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THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


WORKS BY 
HUGH T. KERR, D.D. 





The Gospel in Modern Poetry. 


A keen, thoughtful analysis of some of the best-known 
modern poems and the gospel message they bear 
for the life of our-own day. The poems are by the 
following: Alice Meynell; William. Carruth; 
Francis Thompson; Gilbert K. Chesterton; Alan 
Seeger; W.E. Henley ; Walter De La Mare; Rud- 
yard Kipling; Richard Le Gallienne; Joaquin 
Miller; Vachel Lindsay; John Masefield; Ed- 
win Markham; Thomas Hardy ; Dorothy Frances 
Gurney; and Cale; Vounp Rice Wit) oar. ae takO 


Children’s Gospel Story-Sermons. 


«These are Story-Sermons. They are not stories and 
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a moral to a tale.’ They are not sermons and must 
not be tested by the one, two, three, method of 
the classroom or the pulpit.”— Christian Work. 


$1.25 
Children’s Missionary Story-Sermons. 


« Told in simple, yet engrossing fashion, the story of 
missionary heroism becomes in Dr. Kerr’s capable 
hands a realm of veritable romance in which deeds 
of knightly valor are done in the name of the great 
king. —- he: Continent 00.03 20. fue Rae 


Children’s Story-Sermons. 


«The story sermons are so attractive, so simple, so 
full of action, and interest and incident, that they 
are not only good to read aloud, but the child will 
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—Sunday School Times. . . . . $1.25 





The Gospel 
In Modern Poetry 


By 
HUGH THOMSON KERR, D.D. 


Pastor, Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 
Pitisburgh, Pa. 





NEw York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, MCMXXVI, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 99 George Street 


PREFACE 


URING a never-to-be-forgotten conversa- 
1) tion touching things secular and sacred, 
with the late Sir William Robertson 
Nicoll, in the quiet seclusion of his study, the great 
editor said that if he had in his keeping the train- 
ing of young men for the Gospel ministry, he would 
cause them to study carefully Spurgeon’s sermons 
and the Muses. Asked to interpret the signifi- 
cance of his remark he replied that young men 
needed passion and vision. Spurgeon, he said, 
would fire their souls and the poets would open 
their eyes and light up their imagination. Henry 
Drummond was working towards the same conclu- 
sion when he said ‘ the business of the preacher is 
not to prove things but to make people see things.’ 
In these chapters the attempt has been made to 
follow the guidance of this light. 

The necessity to make people ‘see things’ be- 
comes a double necessity when the larger part of 
the preacher’s audience is invisible. These ad- 
dresses were all delivered over the radio through 
the courtesy of KDKA, the pioneer broadcasting 
station of the world. Messages have come from 

5 


6 PREFACE 


those who have listened-in from far-distant points 
—from Wales and Cuba, from Canada, and light- 
houses in the Atlantic, from the coal-mining re- 
gions of West Virginia, and the sunny South, from 
the far West, and Hudson Bay posts in the frozen 
North. At the request of the Canadian Westing- 
house Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company a 
message was sent to the Moravian missionaries dur- 
ing the Christmas season,—the Moravian liturgy 
being used. After a lapse of a year an answering 
acknowledgment came, saying that the message had 
been received six hundred miles north of the Arc- 
tic Circle! 

Each one of the addresses contained in this vol- 
ume has a history, and many memories are asso- 
ciated with it. The Listeners brought re- 
sponses from close to a thousand persons, nearly 
two-score of whom confessed to having found the 
Way. I Have a Rendezvous With Death has 
associated with it the memory of a message which 
told me that because of it, the purity and honour 
of a home had been maintained. To read letters 
which come in from one’s invisible audience, is to 
have something of the experience of sitting in a 
confessional. 

Not all the poets whose verses have been put 
to homiletic use confess to the faith which is 
here proclaimed. Most of them are still alive and 
some of these, if happening upon this volume, may 


PREFACE 7 


be surprised to find themselves so interpreted. 
Modern poetry, like modern music, is often form- 
less and appears to have no moral objective. In- 
deed, much of it does not try or expect to get any- 
where. The poet is merely expressing himself, as 
it were, and if he has within him something that is 
worth expressing we are the gainers. There is, 
however, a wistfulness about all ¢rue poetry. In 
his volume, The Soul of Modern Poetry, R. H. 
Strachan says: ‘Our best modern poetry is filled 
with a sense of homesickness which continually 
breaks through the bonds that doom men to ac- 
quiescence in things as they are. It appears as a 
continual quest for beauty, and a continuing wel- 
coming of it as it appears ‘“‘ in the stream of lovely 
things—the stream that flows and yet remains.” 
The poet is animated by the same daring and 
imaginative faith which possessed the soul of the 
Hebrew poet and prophet, who, looking upon 
waterless Jerusalem, yet exclaimed, ‘‘ Lo! a river, 
the streams whereof make glad the city of our 
God.” ’ 

Sometimes a poet sees farther than he under- 
stands. It is this that makes him a poet and his 
interpreter is justified in using his verses as win- 
dows through which to look out into the eternal 
where he sees the land stretching afar and the 
King in His beauty. Where there is beauty, the 
King is never far away. 


8 PREFACE 


Poetry is the language of the heart, the expres- 
sion of the soul’s deepest emotion and in the poetry 
of the Scriptures revealed truth is eternally wedded 
to the rhythm of words whose music “ is the glad- 
ness of the world.” Jesus came to open the eyes 
of the blind so that men may see the Kingdom of 
God. 


He came and took me by the hand 
Up to a red-rose tree, 

He kept His meaning to Himself 
But gave a rose to me. 

I did not pray Him to lay bare 
The mystery to me, 

Enough the rose was heaven to smell, 
And His own face to see. 


Pittsburgh, | Hoy tke 
Pennsylvania. 


I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew 

He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me; 
It was not I that found, O Saviour true; 
No, I was found of Thee. 


Thou didst reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold; 
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea,— 
*Twas not so much that I on Thee took hold, 
As Thou, dear Lord, on me. 


I find, I walk, I love, but, O the whole 
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to Thee; 
For Thou wert long beforehand with my soul, 
Always Thou lovedst me. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


THE author desires to express his appreciation of the 
courtesy extended to him by the following publishers in 
granting him permission to make use in this book of cer- 
tain poems of which they are the holders of the copyrights. 


Charles Scribner’s Sons, for 
Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven 
Alice Meynell’s Christ in the Universe 
Alan Seeger’s J Have a Rendezvous With Death 
William E. Henley’s Invictus 
Dorothy Frances Gurney’s The Lord God Planted a Gar- 
den 


Dodd, Mead and Company, for 
Richard Le Gallienne’s The Second Crucifixion 
Gilbert K. Chesterton’s The House of Christmas 


The Macmillan Company, for 
Vachel Lindsay’s General William Booth Enters Into 
Heaven 


John Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy 


The Century Company, for 

Cale Young Rice’s The Mystic 
Henry Holt and Company, for 

Walter De La Mare’s The Listeners 
Harper and Brothers, for 

Thomas Hardy’s The Impercipient 
Edwin Markham, for 

The Man With the Hoe 


Harr, Wagner Company, for 
Joaquin Miller’s Columbus 


A, P. Watt & Son, Doubleday Page and Compan , for 
Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional nee 


William Carruth, for 
Each in His Own Tongue 


10 


CONTENTS 


I 
THE LISTENERS . ; ; 3 @ ; 
Walter De La Mare 
II 
THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION ., i A 2 a 
Richard Le Gallienne 
III 
THE HoUND OF HEAVEN : x * ‘ 
Francis Thompson 
IV 
CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE . A : 
Alice Meynell 
V 
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS . ‘| ; e e 
Gilbert K. Chesterton 
VI 
I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH , R : 
Alan Seeger 
Vil 
RECESSIONAL : : : } ¢ - ; 
Rudyard Kipling 
VIII 
GENERAL WiLLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN 
Vachel Lindsay 
IX 
INVICTUS 


William Ernest Henley 
AL 


13 


a 


37 


47 


57 


66 


77 


go 


Io! 


12 CONTENTS 


x 
EACH IN His OWN TONGUE . 5 : ‘ ‘ Lhe 
William Flerbert Carruth 
xl 
THE EVERLASTING MERCY . : ? ; : (ies 
Fohn Masefield 
XII 
THe MAN WITH THE HOE ., : ; : : oe 
Edwin Markham 
XIII 
COLUMBUS 2 ; : ¢ ° Pin 8 
Foaguin Miller 
XIV 
THE IMPERCIPIENT ; : ; : ; ° iy ct. 
Thomas fHardy 
xXxV 
THE LORD GOD PLANTED A GARDEN . : : 2 OS 
Dorothy Frances Gurney 
XVI 
THE MYSTIC . : ° ; : ; ° oi eal 


Cale Young Rice 


{ 
THE LISTENERS 


WALTER DE LA MARE 


P “HE assertion has often been made that the 
greatest of all preachers is a poet. I fear 
we shall have to take back that state- 

ment. We ought to say that the greatest of all 

preachers is a painter, and that there is no ser- 
mon comparable to a great painting. If you wish 
to listen to the greatest sermon ever preached upon 
the Cross you will not go to any volume upon the 
Atonement, but to Antwerp Cathedral and there 
gaze on Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, and see, 
as if before your very eyes, the suffering and 
death of our Lord on Calvary. If it is a sermon 
on the Last Supper on the night on which He was 
betrayed that you seek, you will not discover the 
greatest exposition in any of the volumes of ithe 
saints or scholars—you will find it in the little 
chapel in Milan where Leonardo da Vinci outlined 
and painted Jesus and His disciples as they sat 
together for the last time and the sacramental feast 
was instituted. If it is a sermon on Hope you 


need, the hope that lasts and ultimately brings vic- 
13 


14 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


tory, you will look for it not in any large volume, 
for you will find it in George Frederick Watts’ pic- 
ture of the blindfolded girl sitting on the top of 
an empty world, playing upon her harp, all .the 
strings missing but one. One of the greatest 
truths in the New Testament is: ‘ Behold I stand 
at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, 
and open the door, I will come in to him, and will 
sup with him and he with me.’ If you wish to dis- 
cover the greatest sermon on this great text, where 
will you turn? Great preachers have tried their 
hand at it and have preached sermons that glow 
with living passion. George Matheson, Alexander 
Maclaren, George Morrison, Oswald Dykes, Joseph 
Parker, Bishop Ryle, Archbishop Trench, George 
Macdonald and Peter Taylor Forsyth. have 
preached on this great theme. They have 
preached great sermons, but if you wish the great- 
est of all you will turn not to any book, but to 
the canvas of a great painter. How simple and 
familiar is that great text as it speaks to us, in Hol- 
man Hunt’s The Light of the World. Everything 
is there, the dark night, the stillness and the si- 
lence, the closed door, the hinges massive and 
strong but rusty from long lack of use, the en- 
twining vines that have crept and entered into 
every crack and crevice, the waiting Christ with 
lantern in hand, the celestial light on His face and 
the uplifted hand that knocks. ‘See the Christ 


THE LISTENERS 15 


stand ’—listening, waiting, victoriously patient. 
The painter has made it appear as if He had been 
there always, but would not forever remain there 
knocking, waiting 


Yes, the piercéd hand still knocketh, 
And beneath the crownéd hair 

Beam the patient eyes, so tender, 
Of thy Saviour, waiting there. 


The painting mirrors the message of the text 
exactly. Jesus is represented as standing at the 
door where carelessness, negligence and self-satis- 
faction have their abiding place, saying, ‘ Behold, 
I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear 
my voice, and open the door, I will come in to 
him, and will sup with him, and he with me.’ 

If we concede that the painter is the greatest of 
all preachers we must still maintain that the poet 
is not far behind. Indeed, the poet and the painter 
belong to the same order and he only is great in 
preaching who partakes also of the same spirit. 
It is the spirit of the seer, the prophet, the man of 
vision. It would be hard to improve upon the 
message of any one of a number of poems that 
have become hymns and that sing their immortal 
message to the soul, such as O Jesus, Thou Art 
Standing, or Behold a Stranger at the Door. 1 do 
not know what Walter De La Mare had in mind 
when he wrote about The Listeners. My instructor 


16 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


in English, Professor Alexander, in the University 
of Toronto, to whom I owe more than I can repay, 
writes me that he never thought of taking these 
lines as having any religious message. Perhaps 
they have not, and again perhaps they have, for if 
the poet had had in mind their spiritual imagery 
he could not have written a more appealing sermon 
than he has done. Here, too, we have the closed 
door, the darkness, the silence, and the waiting 
traveller in the night knocking, and knocking un- 
availingly: 


“Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, 

Knocking on the moonlit door; 

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 
Of the forest's ferny floor: 

And a bird flew up out of the turret, 
Above the Traveller's head: 

And he smote upon the door again a second time; 
“Is there anybody there?’ he said. 

But no one descended to the Traveller; 
No head from the leaf-fringed sill 

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, 
Where he stood perplexed and still. 

But only a host of phantom listeners 
That dwelt in the lone house then 

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 
Lo that voice from the world of men: 

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark 

stair, 

That goes down to the empty hall, 

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken 
By the lonely Traveller’s call. 


THE LISTENERS 17 


What the painter has said the poet emphasizes, 
and both together proclaim the message of the 
closing invitation of the Bible: ‘ Behold, I stand 
at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, 
and open the door, I will come in to him, and will 
sup with him, and he with me.’ What a drama 
it is! There you see the traveller, the visitor, the 
watcher in the night. There he stands knocking, 
listening, quietly, patiently listening. Somewhere, 
too, there is the listener. Wedo not see him. He 
is behind the closed door. Does he hear? Why 
does he not hear? Why does he not heed? Let 
us try to make the discovery. Let us think of him 
who knocks and of him who listens. 

It is a familiar figure, this of the hand that 
knocks upon the door of the life. From our child- 
hood we have ever been hearing the insistency that 
demands entrance into the secret places of our 
hearts. We have been listening to visitors who 
stand at the door of life, asking us to open the 
door and give them welcome. How insistent they 
are! Sometimes they knock like thunder as if 
they would break down all our restraint, and some- 
times their knock is like the gentle touch of a 
little child. Everything in the world seems to de- 
mand entrance, health, yes, and disease, wealth 
and poverty, culture and superstition, sin and 
holiness, God and the devil, they all come to us 
saying, ‘ Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ 


18 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


Do you remember how the men of Sodom 
knocked at the door of Lot? Lot’s righteous soul 
had vexed itself because of the sin of Sodom, but 
he was too weak to bar and bolt that door once 
and for all. Sodom was just another name for hell. 
It was full of all sorts of devilishness. Its women 
were shameless, its men were vile. Its passions 
were red like scarlet, and the measure of its in- 
iquity was about full. One night Lot found all 
these dark and devilish things knocking at his door. 
There was no silencing them. They were fiends 
attacking the central citadel of the soul, and had 
it not been for the angel the door of Lot’s house 
and all that was sacred in his soul would have 
fallen that night into the pit of hell. Now you 
know what that means. There are young men 
and women, yes, and older men and women, too, 
who are listening to that same insistent knocking. 
The voices of Sodom are crying out above the 
thunderous knocking in the darkness: ‘ Behold, I 
stand at the door and knock.’ 

If that old Bible story is not familiar to some of 
you, perhaps the story of Macbeth has not yet 
faded from your memory. Macbeth had done his 
dark deed in the night and his hands were red 
with the blood of his victim. You remember the 
scene. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are standing 
together in the silence in the night alone in their 


THE LISTENERS 19 


secret chamber. Macbeth’s conscience is awake. 
He is easily startled. He hears voices. 


Methought, I heard a voice cry, ‘ Sleep no more!’ 


It continues to cry, and then above the cry he hears 
a knock. To Lady Macbeth he says: 


“Whence is that knocking? 
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me? 
What hands are here! Ha! they pluck out mine 
eyes.’ 


Lady Macbeth would comfort him, but as her 
words run out in easy courage she, too, hears the 
constant knock, knock, knock, on the castle door. 
Shakespeare makes us hear nothing else. The 
words are drowned in the thunder of the knocking. 
He makes us understand that it is not Macduff 
and Lennox that are at the porter’s door, but con- 
science all alive as from the very throne of God. 
There is no one who knows anything about life and 
his own soul that has not heard something akin to 
what Macbeth heard. It is a way conscience has. 
Perhaps, too, it is knocking at your barred door— 
some sin still covered, some deed done, some 
wrong word spoken, some nasty letter written, and 
when you think upon it you hear the knocking in 
the night. 

But the Traveller of whom I desire to speak be- 
longs, however, to another world. While it is true 


20 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


that sometimes He knocks like thunder, the touch 
of His pierced hand is more apt to be like that of a 
mother! How quiet He is! How patient He is! 
How willing He is! You have heard Him knock- 
ing at the door of your life. ‘When have we 
heard Him knocking?’ you say. Surely it is not 
necessary for me to tell you. When the old year 
ran out and the new took its place in the quiet of 
those transition moments you heard Him knock at 
your door. When death came and took some one 
you loved, again you heard His hand upon the 
door. As you took your little child into your arms 
and looked down into the face of purity and inno- 
cence, something stirred within you, it was He 
knocking at the door of your life. Perhaps it was 
as you stood beside your boy when he was going off 
to college or out into the world. Something tugged 
at your heart. It was His knock. As you awak- 
ened Sunday morning with its peace and its sacred 
memories, and your thoughts went out to the old 
home of your early training, it was He knocking 
for entrance. The sermon you heard, the book 
you read, the music that stirred you and awoke 
within you the dream of a better life, all came from 
Him who stands waiting for your welcome. He 
comes in a thousand different ways, in every act 
of heroism, in every thought of holiness, in every 
pure emotion, in every true joy, in every sorrow. 
The other Sunday morning a man who has not yet 


THE LISTENERS 21 


given his heart to Christ said, ‘I am going out 
feeling I ought to be a better man.’ That was 
Christ knocking at the door of his heart. He is 
never far away. When you come face to face 
with duty, with human sorrow, with the starry 
heavens, with love, or joy, or happiness, or per- 
haps failure, then you hear Him saying, ‘ Behold, 
I stand at the door and knock.’ 

Why does He not enter? He is not a suppliant. 
He isa king. He is not a beggar. He is a bene- 
factor. He is not in need. He has come to be- 
stow. His is the hand that lifts empires off their 
hinges. He is not a slave, but a sovereign, and yet 
He stands as a suppliant before a closed door, and 
all He can do is to knock. Why does He not lift 
the latch and walk in? Well, the truth is there is 
no latch. If you look at Hunt’s picture you 
will see the door cannot be opened from the out- 
side. There is neither latch nor handle by which 
to open it. The door is barred and bolted on the 
inside. Only the occupant within can open the 
door. There is no one who could believe more 
firmly in the sovereign grace of Almighty God than 
I do, and yet I know full well that God Himself 
does not force a man’s will. It is this moral sov- 
ereignty of man that puts the ‘zf’” into this phrase. 
‘If any man will open the door.’ He may open 
it to the sound of the knocking and welcome the 
divine visitor, or he may not, but one thing is 


22 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


sure, the door must be opened from within. The 
man must will to believe that He who knocks has 
come to bless, and there is some one there who, if 
he will, can rise and unbar the door. You feel that 
as you read this passage there is some one there. 
You know there is some one listening but not an- 
swering. You feel the same thing as you listen to 
the lines of De La Mare’s poem. There is some- 
body behind the closed door listening in the silence, 
but not answering: 


And he felt in his heart their strangeness, 
Their stillness answering his cry, 
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 
’Neath the starred and leafy sky; 
For he suddenly smote on the door, even 
Louder, and lifted his head:— 
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, 
That I kept my word, he said. 
Never the least stir made the listeners, 
Though every word he spake 
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still 
house 
From the one man left awake: 
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, 
And the sound of iron on stone, 
And how the silence surged softly backward, 
When the plunging hoofs were gone. 


You hear the traveller leaving the house and dis- 
appearing in the darkness and all the while you 


THE LISTENERS 23 


have a haunting sense that some one saw and 
heard everything and yet no one came down to 
open the door and welcome in the traveller, and 
this is the tragedy of life, that perhaps God has 
been knocking at your door since childhood and 
you have listened and gone your way. Sundays 
come and go, new years come and pass, sacraments 
and songs, births and deaths, sorrows and joys en- 
ter your life. You hear His hand knocking, but 
you heed Him not. I suppose you think He will 
stand there forever. I suppose you think He will 
be there when the time comes for you to let Him 
in. Pope Pius on Christmas Eve, 1925, stood be- 
fore the Holy Gate in St. Peter’s and knocked three 
times with a silver hammer, saying, ‘ Open to me 
the gates of justice,’ and the door that had been 
sealed for twenty-five years opened and a mighty 
throng with songs upon their lips passed into the 
temple, and Christmas Eve ushered in the holy 
year of the Roman Catholic Church. When the 
year ended the door was once again sealed for 
another twenty-five years. Suppose Christ should 
stand only once in twenty-five years at the door 
of your life? Perhaps some of you may never have 
another opportunity. Before twenty-five years go 
by the door of life for you will be closed, but if that 
opportunity should come how you would wait for 
Him! How you would plan for His coming! 
How you would listen to the sound of His footfall 


24 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


and yet because you think He still stands waiting 
on your willingness you tarry. 

Rise up, and open the door for Him. You must 
do it for yourself. Your will is yours to make it 
His. Come to me and tell me that you have let 
Him in. Write me a letter and tell me that you 
have given a welcome to the waiting Christ. I 
have received many grateful and gracious letters 
from my hearers and readers, but none will give 
me more joy than your letter that tells me that you 
heard the Lord Jesus knocking at your door and 
you rose up and let Him in. 


II 
THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION 


RICHARD LE GALLIENNE 


— “HE attempt to discredit Christianity is not 
new. It is as old as Christianity itself. 
When the Gospel was first proclaimed all 
the advocates of death and darkness came forth. 
When it was first announced that Jesus had risen 
from the dead the enemy was on hand with an ex- 
planation: ‘Say ye, his disciples came by night, and 
stole him away while he slept.’ The Epistle to the 
Hebrews was written less than fifty years after the 
death of Christ. Yet in that Epistle there is men- 
tion made of men who were crucifying Christ 
afresh and putting Him to an open shame. How 
can a man crucify to himself afresh the Son of 
God? How can there be a second crucifixion? 
The answer is very simple. A man can crucify 
Christ a second time by turning his back upon 
Christ. He can do it by refusing to accept Christ 
as his Lord. He can do it by living as if Jesus had 
never lived, as if He had never died. 
It is being done to-day. Men by the thousands 
are living as if Christ had never died and rose again 
25 


26 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


for their salvation. They are living as if death 
ended all. Some of them are saying that the Gos- 
pel is a failure, and that Christianity is bankrupt. 
We are being told by those who assume to be 
prophets that Christianity is now thrown into the 
melting pot to be recast and refashioned again to 
suit our modern age: We are being told that 
Christianity must go the way of all religions and 
that it is impossible to cling to traditions two thou- 
sand years old in the light of the developments of 
modern thought and modern science. In the Brit- 
ish Royal Academy, in 1904, Sigismund Goetze’s 
great painting, Despised and Rejected of Men, 
was first exhibited. It is an artist’s conception of 
the second crucifixion. Near St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
from which gleams the golden cross, prophetic of 
the triumph of Christianity, the painter represents 
Christ again upon His Cross, wearing the crown of 
thorns. It is afternoon in London; the crowd 
passes and surges on, heedless, blind to His pres- 
ence. Near by is a jockey almost touching the feet 
of Jesus, engrossed in studying the latest edition of 
the racing bulletin. Here is a scientist with his 
test tube, too busy to bestow a look upon the Cru- 
cified. The representatives of the life of pleasure 
are all here: women in evening dress, and gay 
courtiers. Here is an abandoned woman, and a 
newsboy exhibiting a newspaper with the latest di- 
vorce sensation. In the forefront of the picture is 


THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION 27 


an ecclesiastic, well-kept, self-satisfied, but oblivi- 
ous to Christ. They are all here, the representa- 
tives of our modern life, even the theologian so 
busy with his teaching that he misses the spirit of 
the Cross. Only one person in all the throng lifts 
her face to the lonely figure of the Christ. She isa 
nurse on her way to a home of suffering and for a 
moment she pauses, before passing on her way. It 
is an appealing picture of Christ neglected, unrec- 
ognized, dishonoured, as if again we heard the pro- 
phetic words, ‘ Is it nothing to you all ye that pass 
by? behold, and see iH there be any sorrow like unto 
my sorrow. 

This, too, is the Here of Richard Le Gallienne’s 
verses entitled The Second Crucifixion. Some 
years ago Mr. Le Gallienne, who is an English poet 
now living in America, was engaged in a theological 
controversy with Robert Buchanan, a poet and a 
Scotsman of letters. The subject of the contro- 
versy was ‘Is Christianity Played Out?’ Now, Mr. 
Le Gallienne is not what one would call a church- 
man. Indeed, he says some very hard words about 
churches and organized Christianity in his little 
book, The Religion of a Literary Man, which 
was the product of this controversy, but, with it all, 
he has a great and a supreme loyalty for Jesus 
Christ. Whether or not this poem I am using as 
an illustration was written for controversial pur- 
poses or not, it nevertheless answers perfectly the 


28 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


question which he was earnestly debating with 
Robert Buchanan, ‘ Is Christianity Played Out? ’ 

The first verse reflects the mocking mood of the 
irreverent crowd that wishes to forget Christ. 
Christ is dead, says the mocking multitude. He is 
still upon His Cross. 


Loud mockers in the roaring street 
Say Christ is crucified again: 

Twice pierced His gospel-bearing feet, 
Twice broken His great heart in vain. 


There is evidence in the life of our modern world 
that these words express the sentiment of many 
who would not dare give such bold expression to 
their thoughts. Lord Birkenhead, speaking before 
the students of Glasgow University, told the people 
of Great Britain that idealism is dead and bade 
them sharpen their swords, for the prizes of life, he 
says, belong to the nation that has the quickest and 
the sharpest sword. We are being told that human 
nature cannot change and that Christianity has 
failed to solve the problems of life. Racial jeal- 
ousies and international hatred and class suspicion 
dominate the thoughts of men, and the gentleness 
and idealism of Jesus have been nailed to the Cross. 
There is some truth in this. We are not the Chris- 
tians we ought to be, and the Spirit of Christ does 
_not dominate and possess the Church as it ought to 
possess it. Nevertheless the words of Chester- 


THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION 29 


ton are true: ‘ Christianity has not been tried and 
found wanting; it has been tried and found diffi- 
cult.’ The poet listens, however, to the crowd in 
the roaring street, and quietly replies: 


I hear, and to myself I smile, 
For Christ talked with me all the while. 


This is evidence that cannot be gainsaid. Christ is 
not dead. He was never more alive than He is to- 
day. If you ask where He is now I will tell you. 
He stands knocking at the door of every social in- 
justice, of every national and international wrong, 
at the door of every social problem and at the door 
of every hungry human heart, saying, ‘ If any man 
will open the door I will come in.’ 

In the second verse the mocking multitude turns 
from the thought of the Cross to the tomb where 
Jesus was laid. It finds the tomb is not empty. 
It isaclosedtomb. Itis sealed. The dead Christ 
lies there in that silent, sealed tomb. 


No angel now to roll the stone 
From off His unawaking sleep, 

In vain shall Mary watch alone, 
In vain the soldiers vigil keep. 


Some day perhaps an explorer may come upon that 
sealed tomb as Lord Carnarvon came upon the 
tomb of Tut-ankh-amen. What shall we say. to 
this flippant unbelief? There are many things to 


30 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


say and many arguments to present. It is not easy 
to dispose of the fact of the Resurrection, and the 
poet says the very best thing that can be said. He 
hears men talking of the sealed tomb and the silent 
Christ and he replies: 


Yet while they deem my Lord is dead 
My eyes are on His shining head. 


It is very difficult to answer that argument and 
there are millions of people who can rise up and 
testify that they have experienced and know the 
presence of the living Christ. 

The third stanza turns to the Gospel faith. 
After His Resurrection the story of the Gospel con- 
tinues to relate the friendliness and comradeship of 
Jesus. This, however, we are told is superstition. 
There is no such thing as a personal, living Christ. 
All the world has is an absent Christ and a lost 
Saviour. 


Ah! never more shall Mary hear 
That voice exceeding sweet and low 
Within the garden calling clear: 
Her Lord is gone, and she must go. 


To this charge the poet reiterates his answer: 


Yet all the while my Lord I meet 
In every London lane and street. 


The facts of experience are as valid as the facts 
of history and the living Christ as real as the his- 


THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION 34 


toric Jesus. It is an answer to which there can be 
no reply. It is final. People who meet with Christ 
upon the streets of Pittsburgh or of London cannot 
be shaken in their faith. Ihave in my hands a let- 
ter which I have received from Mr. Le Gallienne. 
It reads as follows: 


‘I much appreciate the honouring use you pro- 
pose making of my verses, The Second Crucifixion, 
and though I do not belong to any organized 
church, I can sincerely say that I am no less aware 
of the spirit of Christ walking on the troubled 
waters of the modern world than when as a boy I 
met Him “in every London lane and street.”” Our 
need of Him is greater than ever, and, in spite of 
disheartening appearances, I firmly believe that 
His influence is making itself felt all the time with 
an ever-increasing power.’ 


That is an experience beyond the reach of criti- 
cism. 

The fourth verse looks out upon human need 
and human suffering. How great it is! How ap- 
pealing it was in the time of our Lord! In the 
days of His flesh He went among the poor and the 
blind and the needy, as a Healer and as the Great 
Physician. Years afterwards when these days 
were only a memory the Apostles remembered Je- 
sus as the one who went about doing good. That 
is a fine tribute, but now we are told there is no 
Healer, no Physician, no Saviour. 


32 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


We are in the grip of a mechanistic universe 
which operates with machine-like precision and 
with no place for freedom and no room for spiritual 
values; a world in which natural laws rule from 
centre to circumference, and the facts of faith by 
which men live are considered dreams and illusions. 


Poor Lazarus shall wait in vain, 
And Bartimeus still go blind; 
The healing hem shall ne’er again 
Be touched by suffering humankind. 


Is that true? Does that fit in with the facts of 
life? Does that answer to the experience of men? 
This poem says that it does not and that Christ still 
walks among men: 


Yet all the while I see them rest, 
The poor and outcast, on His breast. 


It is still true that men, women and children rise 
up and say that the only real satisfaction they 
know is the comfort and solace which the Gospel of 
Christ furnishes. My mail is full of the testimony 
of those who know of the power of the living Christ 
to heal and to help. Out of his vast loneliness, in 
the midst of dark paganism, standing alone beside 
the open grave of his partner in life, John G. Paton 
said, ‘If it had not been for Jesus ’ It is im- 
possible to argue against an experience like that. 
The last verse of this short but interesting poem 





THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION 33 


speaks of the hopelessness which falls upon human- 
ity when men begin to think that the Christ who 
had brought hope to the hearts of men had left the 
world; that He who had knocked at the doors of 
men’s hearts bringing in His hands the everlasting 
mercy knocks no more. His hand is still now and 
His voice is silent. All these strange and mystic 
experiences we are told can be explained by psy- 
chology, or by psycho-analysis, or by the moving 
of the subconscious mind. 


No more unto the stubborn heart 
With gentle knocking shall He plead, 
No more the mystic pity start, 
For Christ twice dead is dead indeed. 


To this again the poet replies with the simple state- 
ment: 


So in the street I hear men say, 
Yet Christ is with me all the day. 


This, then, is the repeated and reiterated argument 
of a Christian man to all the assertions that Chris- 
tianity has failed and that the Gospel of Christ is 
discredited. It is the answer, not of logic, of the- 
ology, but the answer of experience. A Japanese 
student of religion has lately said, ‘ We have been 
experimenting much, but have not experienced.’ 
Experience, after all, is the test of truth. There 
may be those who can get comfort and religious 


34 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


proof from other evidences. They may receive 
help from what the spade turns up in Bible lands, 
and receive encouragement from the confirmations 
of documents rescued from the rubbish-heaps of 
Egypt and Assyria. They may take comfort from 
the findings of scholarship and clutch greedily at 
the crumbs of comfort that fall from the table of 
the scientist. Well, it is all good, so far as it goes, 
but all such evidence is worthless compared with 
the evidence of the heart that knows God, and that 
can say, ‘I had heard of thee by the hearing of 
the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.’ No argu- 
ment can pierce the shield of the man who knows 
that the Spirit of God bears witness with his spirit. 

Years ago a book was written by Guy Thorne en- 
titled When It Was Dark. It is a story based 
upon the reputed discovery of the tomb in which 
Jesus had been buried. In the tomb a tablet was 
discovered with the inscription, ‘I, Joseph of Ari- 
mathza, stole the body of Jesus from the tomb, 
and hid it.’ Gradually the faith of men in the 
Resurrection failed and darkness fell upon the 
world. The hope-of immortality vanished like the 
fabric of a dream and in its place hopelessness and 
despair took up their abode. The hero of the 
book, however, is a Christian woman who refused 
to believe the evidence because in her own heart 
she knew the presence of the living Christ, and 
through all the darkness she held to the fact of her 


THE SECOND CRUCIFIXION ae 


own experience. She knew that her Redeemer 
lived, and at last her faith triumphed when the de- 
ception was revealed and the fiction made plain. 
The heart has its reasons which the intellect cannot 
understand, and Mr. Le Gallienne himself has said, 
‘To think less and feel more is the one cure for 
modern doubt.’ I would not have you think less, 
but I would have you feel more. ‘To be able to 
stand up before all the world and say with the blind 
man who had experienced the gracious gift of heal- 
ing from the hands of Jesus, ‘Whether he be a 
sinner or not I know not. One thing I know; 
whereas I was blind now I see,’ that is to present 
evidence for the reality of the Gospel which cannot 
be refuted. To stand up before the world and say 
with the Apostle Paul, ‘I know whom I have be- 
lieved; I am persuaded that he is able to keep that 
which I have committed unto him,’ is to silence all 
controversy and to establish religion on a scientific 
basis. Religion is experience. This is eternal life, 
to know God. ‘Theology is the explanation, the in- 
terpretation of religious experience. A man may 
be a noted theologian and know nothing about re- 
ligion. Some of the most unlovely Christians have 
been men who were able to talk wisely and to dis- 
cuss learnedly about theology. They need not 
tremble for the safety of the Ark of God who know 
Christ in their own hearts and who have experi- 
enced the presence of God in their own spirits. 


36 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


When asked as to what was his greatest discov- 
ery, Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of chloro- 
form, replied, ‘ The greatest discovery that I have 
ever made is the discovery that Jesus Christ is my 
Saviour.’ Are we able to say to all the doubts 
and difficulties that are rampant in our complex 
modern world, ‘I know whom I have believed ’? 
Do not miss the personal note. Paul is not saying, 
‘I know what I have believed.’ He is asserting the 
central conviction of his religious life. ‘I know 
whom I have believed.’ Are we able to say with 
Job who groped his way through shadows in the 
twilight of religious faith, ‘I know that my Re- 
deemer liveth’? Religion is a fact, an experience 
of the soul, an experience which knows that Christ 
having died once dieth no more forever. 


I cannot put His Presence by, I meet Him every- 
where; 

I meet Him in the country town, the busy market- 
square; 

The Mansion and the Tenement attest His Presence 
there. 


Upon the funneled ships at sea He sets His shining 
feet; 

The Distant Ends of Empire not in vain His Name 
repeat,— 

And, like the presence of a rose, He makes the whole 
world sweet! 


III 
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 


FRANCIS THOMPSON 


q “QHE finest poetry in the whole range of 
literature is in the Bible. One does not 
need to leave the Bible to enjoy good lit- 

erature. The choicest imagery is found in the 
prophets and in the Psalms, and Giovanni Papini 
has lately been telling us that Jesus is the greatest 
poet the world has ever known. Where, for ex- 
ample, can you discover poetry like this, in which 
the writer is speaking of the impossibility of escap- 
ing God? 


Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 
If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 

If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, 
And the light about me shall be night; 

Even the darkness hideth not from thee, 

But the night shineth as the day: 

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee 


37 


38 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


God is the unescapable. Man is a fugitive, a 
fugitive from God. It is strange that any one 
should want to flee from God, but after we have 
said the last word about man’s search for God there 
is still a word to be spoken concerning God’s search 
forman. The most tragic thing in history is man’s 
search for God. It has ended in failure and de- 
feat. The most triumphant thing in history is 
God’s search after man. It has ended in discovery 
and redemption. Strange as it may seem, man has 
always fled from God. 

Open your Bible and on almost the first page you 
will discover a man fleeing from God, hiding from 
God, among the trees of the garden, and God 
searching for him, coming in the cool of the day 
and calling to the fugitive, ‘Where art thou?’ 
Turn over a few pages and you will come upon 
Jacob, and he, too, is fleeing from the presence of 
Jehovah, out into a far country where God could 
not follow him, and where he would be alone with 
his deceit and duplicity. There in the far country 
he sleeps with a stone for his pillow, and suddenly 
the angels of God appear, and he awakes to dis- 
cover that God is there, and the very gate of 
Heaven opened on his view. A chapter fur- 
ther on we come upon Elijah, and he, too, is a fugi- 
tive, out in the wilderness hiding, discouraged, dis- 
illusioned, wishing to die. Suddenly the angel of 
God is at his side, and the question is asked, ‘ What 


THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 39 


doest thou here, Elijah?’ Even in the wilderness 
God had found him. Before the Old Testament 
closes we come upon the most wonderful of all the 
stories—so often misinterpreted, so often misun- 
derstood—the story of Jonah, which tells of the 
fugitive who fled from the presence of God out into 
the deep, boundless sea, but even there God found 
him. God discovered him, redeemed him, and set 
him again in the place of peace. 

After all, God is the Great Seeker, and when He 
appeared in human flesh it was announced that He 
had come ‘ to seek and save that which was lost.’ 
Jesus exhausted language in trying to tell the story 
of the search of God. ‘God,’ He said, ‘is like a 
shepherd who goes out into the wilderness after the 
lost sheep. God is like a woman who has lost part 
of her treasure and searches in the dust and dirt of 
her mud floor to find that which she had lost. God 
is like a father whose son is in the far country and 
whose spirit searches and seeks until there is a re- 
turn of love, of hope, and of purity.’ This is the 
central fact of our religion. God is the Great 
Seeker, and in His seeking we find our hope. Like 
men lost at sea our hope lies in being discovered. 
Like men imprisoned in the mine our hope is not in 
the darkness but in the light where helpful hands 
break through into the prison house. In the words 
of Pascal, ‘We would not now be seeking Him if 
we had not already been found by Him.’ 


40 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


It was this truth that Francis Thompson illus- 
trated and emphasized in his poem The Hound of 
Heaven. It is a poem of only one hundred eighty- 
three lines, but it is one of the greatest in English 
literature. He calls God ‘ The Hound of Heaven.’ 
It is a bold figure, and is used in the title only. 
‘ God,’ he says, ‘ is the Great Seeker after the souls 
of men. He is out on the trail of the lost, tracing, 
tracking the fugitive.’ It is the pursuit of love, 
however, and not of vengeance, and love knows 
better how to pursue than fear knows how to evade. 
It is impossible to evade God. When the fleeing 
soul turns at last it is discovered that God is not to 
be feared but is the tremendous lover of our souls, 
and then the fugitive knows that goodness and 
mercy have pursued him,—that is the word—all 
his life. 

Francis Thompson died at the age of forty-eight, 
a somewhat broken but happy man. Of him some 
one, quoting Thomas Gray, has said: 


He gave to mis’ry (all he had) a tear. 
The tear was The Hound of Heaven; 


He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) 
a friend. 


The friend was Wilfred Meynell, who, in the provi- 
dence of God, became his friend and benefactor. 


THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 4l 


Thompson was brought up in refinement but lived 
a drifting sort of life. He had indolent habits and 
was always something of a child. He never put 
away his toys. He was never able to get up until 
the day’s work was nearly done and was always be- 
hindhand. Destined for the priesthood he was dis- 
missed from school for incompetency. Studying 
medicine for a profession he drifted into a user of 
drugs. Loved at home he became a wanderer and 
a homeless vagabond in the city of London. There 
he drifted into poverty, sleeping on the Thames 
embankment, selling matches, calling cabs, black- 
ing shoes, living in poverty and in rags. His mind, 
however, was pure, and his intellect was alert. He 
submitted a manuscript so soiled and stained that it 
could scarcely be read and this manuscript came 
into the hands of Wilfred Meynell, who sent for 
him, and later sought for months to discover the 
place of his dwelling. One day Thompson came. 
The story tells itself: ‘The door opened, and a 
strange hand was thrust in. The door closed, but 
Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, 
again it shut. At the third attempt a wail of a 
mancamein. No such figure had been looked for; 
more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, 
with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in 
broken shoes.’ | 

He found in Wilfred Meynell a friend. He 
found love. He found new life. He became one 


42 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


of England’s greatest poets and in The Hound of 
Heaven we have the autobiography of a twice-born 
man. 

His life had been a flight. What had he been? 
He had been a fugitive, a fugitive from God as well 
as from man. It is this thought that dominates the 
poem. He had looked into his own life and dis- 
covered that he had sought satisfaction apart from 
God, and that he had tried to flee from God’s pres- 
ence. This is what he says: 


I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 
I fled Him, down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped; 
And shot, precipitated, 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasméd fears, 
From those strong Feet that followed, followed 
after. 
But with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat—and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet— 
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me,’ 


He was unable to find satisfaction in his own 
thoughts, in the laughter of life or its tears, in its 
hopes or in its fears. He found no refuge in his 


THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 43 


own philosophy. Everything seemed to betray 
him because of his betrayal of God. He goes on 
to tell us the path down which he fled. He 
tempted alf God’s servitors, he says, and clung to 
the whistling mane of every wind, but always found 
himself disdained and betrayed, and ever in his 
heart he heard the footfall of his unseen Pursuer. 


Still with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
Came on the following Feet 
And a Voice above thew beat— 
‘Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me,’ 


He was kin to little children and sought for satis- 
faction in the joys and pleasures of innocency, but 
here, too, peace eluded him. He turned to nature. 
He sought for satisfaction within nature’s wind- 
walled palace in fellowship with nature’s secrets, 
the smiling face of the sky and the suggestive 
shadows of the clouds. He laughed in the morn- 
ing’s eyes, and triumphed and saddened with all 
weather. He discovered, however, that nature and 
he did not understand each other. 


For ah! we know not what each other says, 
These things and I; in sound I speak— 
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences. 


After all his seeking and searching he was still flee- 


44 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


ing from God and God was still following. He was 
weary and ready to faint, but still he fled, and 
still— 


Nigh and nigh, draws the chase, 
With unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic imstancy, 
And past those noiséd Feet 
A Voice comes yet more fleet— 
“Lot! naught contents thee, who content’st not Me. 


He was unsatisfied, discontented, naked, and alone. 
From the battlements of the unseen he heard the 
trumpet of eternity but still he hesitated. ‘ What 
has God done,’ says Faber, ‘ that men should not 
trust Him?’ ‘The fugitive knew that he must 
surrender all, everything, and empty himself of his 
own will. This he was unwilling to do. He knew 
full well the name of Him who was pursuing him 
and what the trumpet was saying, but he was un- 
willing to yield his life, and still the voice was 
around him like the bursting sea. Then the 
miracle happened. He stops, he turns, and at his 
side he finds God, the tremendous lover of his 
soul, and the voice which had been ringing in his 
soul, the voice that had been more instant than the 
feet, was speaking. It was speaking not in ven- 
geance nor in expectant judgment but in whispering 
Sympathy, for God’s patience is never exhausted 


THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 45 


and His love never fails. His power is His love 
and He can do only what love itself can do. 


‘Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, 
Save Me, save only Me? 

All which I took from thee I did but take, 
Not for thy harms, 

But gust that thou might’st seek it in My arms. 
All which thy child’s mistake 

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: 
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’ 


God had discovered His own and the life that had 
worn itself out fell back into His arms satisfied and 
at peace: 

“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 


Lam He Whom thou seekest! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me,’ 


There are two things that must be said in inter- 
pretation. The first is that God Himself cannot 
be satisfied without us. He is our Father. We 
are His children. He is the Good Shepherd that 
goes out into the wilderness, seeking the lost. He 
is the Great Seeker who searches for His lost treas- 
ure in the rubbish-heaps of the world. He is the 
Father who not only waits the return of the prod- 
igal but whose Spirit searches the world for His 
own. This is why we sing and rejoice in singing, 
‘O Love that wilt not let me go.’ This is why we 
continue to sing, ‘O Joy that seekest me through 


46 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


pain,’ ‘O Light that followest all my way,’ ‘O 
Cross that liftest up my head.’ 

The second thing that must be said is that we 
cannot be satisfied without God. Nothing can 
content us until we find Him. The heart is rest- 
less for it was made for God. Our souls are 
athirst for God, for the living God. Our hearts 
are hungry for the bread of life. Our thirsty spir- 
its cry out for the water of which if we drink we 
shall never thirst. One Sunday Thomas Henry 
Huxley was staying in a country town. ‘I sup- 
pose you are going to church,’ he said to his friend. 
‘Yes,’ said the friend. ‘What if you stayed at 
home instead and talked to me about your re- 
ligion?’ ‘No,’ said his friend, ‘I am not clever 
enough to refute your arguments.’ Huxley said, 
‘But what if you told me of your own experience, 
what religion has done for you?’ So the friend 
stayed and all through the forenoon they talked 
and Huxley was told the story of what Christ had 
done for one man’s life and at the close of the in- 
terview the great scientist said, ‘I would give my 
right hand if I could believe that.’ Here was the 
hunger of the heart, the thirst of the soul, express- 
ing itself. Science, nature, human love, life itself 
cannot satisfy the heart that is made for God; only 
God Himself can give rest unto our souls. 


IV 
CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE 


ALICE MEYNELL 


\ ) YE live, to-day, not in a world, but in a 
universe. Our world is but one of the 
smaller planets that circle round a cen- 

tral sun. Its path around the sun measures about 
580,000,000 miles. This central sun which lights 
our world is some 95,000,000 of miles distant, and 
though a sun to our world is only one of the stars 
in our universe, one of some two thousand or three 
thousand million similar stars or suns. These stars 
are separated by inconceivable tracts of space. 
Some thirty of them are within a hundred million 
miles of us, but most of the distant stars in the 
Milky Way are at least one hundred thousand tril- 
lion miles away. A ray of light travelling 186,000 
miles a second takes 50,000 years to travel across 
what we know as our universe. And beyond our 
universe there may be other universes that sing 
and swing in the infinite expanse. Speaking to a 
skeptical companion in the night, Napoleon swept 
the starry heavens with his hand and said: ‘ Who 


made all these?’ Science lifts her head and says, 
47 


48 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


‘I do not know.’ Christianity bows reverently 
and answers, ‘ Jesus Christ.’ 

That is a surprising answer. We do not often 
think of Jesus Christ in terms of the universe. 
We are too provincial, too sectarian, too nation- 
alistic. To say that Jesus has title to a universal 
domain challenges our intelligence as well as our 
imagination. Yet this is the claim the New Testa- 
ment makes for Him. It proclaims Him Lord of 
all. It sings, ‘ Bring forth the royal diadem, and 
crown Him Lord of all.’ Listen to the simple but 
profound words of St. John: ‘All things were made 
by him: and without him was not anything made 
that was made. In him was life. He was in the 
world and the world was made by him.’ It is 
difficult to explain away this extraordinary claim. 
Hear, too, how St. Paul speaks in a very quiet let- 
ter penned in the interest of reality in things 
spiritual. ‘ Jesus,’ he says, ‘ is the image of the in- 
visible God, the firstborn of every creature: For 
by him were all things created, that are in heaven, 
and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether 
they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or 
powers: all things were created by him, and for 
him: And he is before all things, and in him all 
things consist.’ Did you notice the last word, ‘In 
him all things consist’ 2? The significance of it is 
this, ‘In him all things hold and hang together.’ 
What science in its ignorance calls ‘ gravitation,’ 


CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE 49 


St. Paul calls ‘Christ.’ If science has lengthened 
and broadened and heightened and deepened our 
world the New Testament has its answer ready and 
meets this magnified world with its majestic con- 
ception of the illimitable, infinite Christ. 

It is this conception of Christ which is presented 
in the verses, Christ in the Universe. Alice Mey- 
nell was an English woman who spent much of her 
early life in Italy. Her essays and poetry are 
suffused with a delicate and spiritual atmosphere 
which brings refreshment to the soul of every true 
Christian. The new wonders of the universe were 
just beginning to break upon the modern world 
when she wrote of Christ and the place He held 
not only in her thoughts but in the very life and 
structure of the world. What Christ has been to 
our world we know. ‘The Word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the 
glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of 
grace and truth.’ This is what He means to our 
world. Does He mean anything to the other 
worlds within worlds that wheel their way through 
the infinite space? Are all these stars and suns 
and worlds merely attendant upon our little planet, 
or is life to be found there as here, and has God 
manifested Himself in other worlds that have not 
been engulfed in the backwash of evil as our world 
has been? Can it be true that this world of ours 
is distinguished above all worlds, obscure as it is, 


50 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


by the thorn-crowned Christ, the Cross and the 
empty tomb? May it be true that in other and 
brighter worlds beyond our knowing, He has in 
some other form revealed Himself? Was He Him- 
self while here among men thinking of something 
like this when He said, ‘ Other sheep I have, which 
are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and 
they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one 
fold, and one shepherd’ ? 

This, you say, is speculation. Concerning such 
questions we cannot dogmatize, but of this we may 
be certain: this planet of ours has been trodden 
by the sacred feet of the Son of God, not Palestine 
alone, but the ground that we stand on is holy 
ground. It was into this world He was born. It 
was our way He took through life, ‘strong Son 
of God, immortal love.’ Says Mrs. Meynell: 


With this ambiguous earth 

His dealings have been told us. These abide: 
The signal to a maid, the human birth, 

The lesson and the young Man crucified. 


What a story it is, this story of ‘ The young Man 
crucified.’ There are other stories in literature to 
contrast with it, but none to compare with it. It 
stands alone. It is a story that has not merely 
been written, but as Emerson said, ‘ ploughed into 
the history of the world.’ It began in music, sung 
by angel choirs, but it never ends. It is the story 


CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE 51 


of a little child. It is the story of a perfect life. 
It is the story of a young man crucified. It is the 
story of One, the Man of Sorrows, the Saviour who 
opened His arms, and invited all men to find rest in 
Him. He is not of the east nor of the west. He 
is human and in Him east and west meet. On first 
hearing of the story of Jesus an educated Brahman 
said: ‘ Thou, O Christ, art the only Buddha.’ 

And it all took place upon this planet of ours. 
It is the most incredible, inconceivable, impossible 
story, this story that God was in Christ, living, 
serving, dying, saving this world of ours, and 


Not a star of all 
The innumerable host of stars has heard 
How He administered this terrestrial ball. 
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word. 


Of His earth-visiting feet 
None knows the secret—cherished, perilous; 
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, 
sweet, 
Heart-shattering secret of His way wnth us. 


If, for example, England claims Shakespeare 
and rejoices over him as against the world; if Ger- 
many claims Goethe; Italy, Dante; France, Victor 
Hugo; Scotland, Sir Walter Scott, and America, 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, this planet of ours claims as 
against all rival claims of other suns and stars and 
planets the Gospel story of how God for us, and 


52 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


for our salvation became man. When the planets 
and suns of all the universe shall come to judg- 
ment this shall be our boast. ‘There may be other 
worlds which can boast of richer and riper civiliza- 
tions, of far-flung harvest fields or mountains that 
soar higher than Everest, of rivers deeper and 
larger than the Amazon and the Mississippi; in 
natural scenery and the richness of waterfalls, for- 
ests and sunsets we may be outclassed, but we shall 
boast still that ours is holy ground, for here the 
Son of God was born and lived and died. 


No planet knows that this 
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave, 
Love and life multiplies, and pain and bliss, 
Bears as chief treasure one forsaken grave. 


This forsaken, empty grave is earth’s most trea- 
sured treasure. 

And yet it may be He has revealed Himself to 
other worlds in other forms. ‘There may be other 
Gospels for other worlds than ours. It is not 
likely that He who made all things beautiful in 
their time would leave His creation to itself. He 
must be ‘the center and soul of every sphere.’ 
Wherever there is life, it must find its source in 
Him. Science to-day is speaking of what it calls 
the insurgence and the abundance of life. More 
and more we are coming to see that we are living 
in a living universe. Life presses up into being 


CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE 53 


through all barriers and fills every corner, crevice, 
and cranny. We find life among the snow-capped 
summits of Monte Rosa, ten thousand feet up, and 
we find it creeping and crawling in the dark, and 
silent depths of the sea. ‘It is hard to say what 
difficulties living creatures may not conquer or cir- 
cumvent. You may find insects in hot springs in 
which you cannot keep your hand immersed, or 
rotifers and other small fry under fifteen feet of 
ice in the little lakes of Antarctica; you find a 
brine-shrimp and two or three other animals in the 
Great Salt Lake; you find a fish climbing a tree, 
and thoroughly terrestrial types like spiders having 
species living under water; there is, as Sir Arthur 
Shipley has shown, a bustle of life on the dry twigs 
of the heather. When we consider the filling of 
every niche, the finding of homes in extraordinary 
places, the mastery of difficult conditions, the 
plasticity that adjusts to out-of-the-way exigences, 
the circumvention of space (as in migration), and 
the conquest of time (as in hibernation), we begin 
to get an impression of the insurgence of life. We 
see life persistent and intrusive—spreading every- 
where, insinuating itself, adapting itself, resisting 
everything, defying everything, surviving every- 
thing! ’ What this life is science cannot tell. The 
New Testament tells us it has its source in Christ: 
‘In him was life.’ ‘He came to give life and to 
give it abundantly.’ We must let the New Testa- 


54 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


ment speak for itself. A recent writer has told us 
that since the universe has grown great we must 
dream for it a greater God. That is not necessary. 
We have in the New Testament a God great enough 
for all imaginable universes. 


Nor, in our little day, 

May His devices with the heavens be quessed; 
Elis pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way, 

Or His bestowals there, be manifest. 


But in the eternities 

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear 
A million alien gospels, in what guise 

fe trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear. 


You say this is fancy. Perhaps it is, but it all 
leads us back to the fact our world knows— 
the fact of Christ. What we have seen of dis- 
covery and enlightenment concerning earth and sea 
and air gives us reason to be alert as to what the 
future may bring forth. The radio has annihilated 
space and time. There are new disclosures, new 
surprises, new revelations awaiting us and our chil- 
dren. Lord Balfour has wisely said, ‘We know 
too much about matter to be materialists.’ Science 
is talking to-day in terms of spiritual reality. We 
are in touch with life, abundant life, with life that 
like a tide beats upon the shores of nameless 
worlds. The universe is one and the infinitesmal 
and invisible atom with its revolving electrons is 


CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE 55 


the same in substance and in glory with the most 
distant sun. The same life flows through ali 
things. This is why Mrs. Meynell brings her no- 
ble verses to a close with the prophetic words: 


Oh, be prepared, my soul, 
To read the inconcetvable, to scan 

The infinite forms of God those stars unroll 
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man. 


This, then, will be our boast when in the eternities 
all the prizes and treasures of all the worlds shall 
be compared. 

And this is the tragedy of it all, that Christ has 
been all this to our poor wayward world, and done 
all this in His life and death for us, and we may 
go our way, careless of the fact that we are heirs 
of this priceless, this immeasurable inheritance. 
Mr. Norman Lockyer has a story of an old abbé 
whom he met while on a scientific mission in the 
Rocky Mountains. The abbé explained that 
some months ago he had been ill and had dreamed 
he had died and gone to heaven. There the angels 
and the redeemed crowding round him asked him 
of the earth from which he had come. Had he 
seen this and had he been there, and resident of 
the world as he had been, he had to confess that he 
had not seen the glories of his own world. Some 
day you and I will stand in the eternities, and the 
wonder and glory and mystery of Christ’s redeem- 


56 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


ing love will be the everlasting theme. It will be 
the song in every heart. And we will be pressed 
to tell what we know of Him who in lowliness and 
love became the heavenly visitant to our earthly 
home. Will we be able to say, ‘ Yes, I knew Him. 
He is my Friend, my Saviour, my Lord. To me 
He is the chiefest among ten thousand, the alto- 
gether lovely.’ Will we be able to say that? Will 
we be prepared to tell the story of His triumphant 
march down through the centuries and how He 
rode to His coronation into the very citadel where 
evil was enthroned? Will we be able to testify to 
the truth by which men have been set free? ‘Then 
we will be able to join in the coronation song and 
crown Him Lord of all. 


V 
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS 


GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 


“HE most dramatic story in the Bible is 
that which tells how Mary and Joseph 
came to Bethlehem and found no room 

in the inn. It is a story that has captivated the 
heart and thrilled the imagination of each genera- 
tion of Christians. It is intensely dramatic and 
yet the story is told in a style so simple and in 
words so matter of fact that it seems to partake of 
the commonplace. The Passover throng, the 
crowded village, the overcrowded inn, the weary 
travellers, the urgency of their need, the refrain 
of ‘No room,’ ‘ No room,’ the welcome of the crazy 
stable close at hand and the cry of a little child 
lying in a manger, is a familiar story to all of us 
and its familiarity sometimes blinds us to the mar- 
vel of it all. 

Think who He was! Think what had hap- 
pened! Think how the world had waited for His 
coming. Think how we look back and adore and 
then read the words, ‘ There was no room for them 
in the inn. When George V. was crowned king, 
his eldest son went to the old Welsh castle of 


Carnarvon to be received as Prince of Wales. Ac- 
57 


58 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


companied by David Lloyd George, greatest of 
living Welshmen, he approached the castle door. 
All within was still. The door was closed and 
barred. He knocked, but there was no answer. 
He knocked again, but there was no response. He 
knocked the third time and the bar was drawn, the 
door was flung wide, and, as he entered, the castle 
was glorious with light and the hall vocal with 
song. ‘The Prince had come unto his own, and his 
own received him with a singing welcome. It was 
not so with the Prince of Peace. He came unto 
His own and His own received Him not. He was 
in the world and the world was made by Him and 
the world knew Him not. To dream such a thing 
is absurd. It is too wonderful, too strange, too hu- 
manly impossible, not to be true. It is incredible, 
but it is history. It belongs to faith, but it is fact. 
There was no room for Him. 

It is this anti-climax, this historic paradox which 
Chesterton, with his well-known love of paradox, 
celebrates in The House of Christmas. 


There fared a mother driven forth 

Out of an inn to roam; 

In the place where she was homeless 

All men are at home. 

The crazy stable close at hand, 

With shaking tumber and shifting sand, 
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand 
Than the square stones of Rome, 


THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS 59 


The House of Christmas, you see, is the very 
climax of paradoxes. Where Mary and Joseph and 
the Christ-Child were homeless you and I are at 
home. ‘ There was no room for them in the inn,’ 
but there is room in the Gospel of Christ for all 
the weary and homeless sons of toil. There in the 
crazy, shaking stable something was disclosed 
which was stronger and more enduring than the 
square stones of the Eternal City. The human 
heart finds its true home in the Gospel supplied by 
the Christmas miracle. ‘The homeless Christ calls 
all the children of men to find their home in Him. 
He explains, He interprets, He satisfies, He gives 
rest unto their souls. He warms our hearts by 
His presence. He walked with two disciples one 
Sunday afternon. They were sad and dispirited. 
The bottom had dropped out of their hopes and all 
they could see was the gathering darkness of fading 
faith. Suddenly Jesus came. At first they did 
not know Him and in a little while He was gone, 
and then, looking into each other’s faces, they said, 
‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked 
with us?’ That was the miracle. Their cold 
hearts were warmed and comforted and their faces 
were illumined as with the dawn. That is what 
Christ does. He warms our hearts. When Phil- 
lips Brooks told Helen Keller about the revelation 
of God in Christ Jesus she said, ‘I know Him al- 
though I have never known His name. [ have felt 


60 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY. 


His presence. It is like the warmth.’ In Christ 
Jesus we are satisfied and our hearts are at home. 

This is the Christmas message: the Gospel of 
Christ satisfies. It is impossible for houses and 
lands and things to satisfy the heart that dreams 
dreams and sees visions and lives not by bread 
alone, but by imagination and aspiration and the 
enjoyment of spiritual beauty. 


For men are homesick in their homes, 

And strangers under the sun, 

And they lay thew heads in a foreign land 
Whenever the day is done. 

flere we have batile and blazing eyes, 

And chance and honour and high surprise, 
But our homes are under miraculous skies 
Where the Yule tale was begun. 


_ We cannot live without the sense of the miraculous, 
the wonder of life, the alluring hope of the invisible. 
This is why Christmas is welcomed by young and 
old. It gives freedom to our spirits. We cease 
to be materialists. We live under miraculous skies. 
We begin to believe again that: Eye hath not seen, 
nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart 
of man, the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love Him. We cannot attain our best 
unless we look up and the miraculous star in the 
sky is God’s gift to man. One of the sayings at- 
tributed to Christ which scholars have discovered 


THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS 61 


goes on to say: Jesus saith, Let not him who seek- 
eth cease from seeking until he has found; and 
when he has found he shall be amazed; and when 
he hath been amazed he shall reign; and when he 
hath reigned he hath rest. 

This is the Christmas message: the Gospel of 
Christ satisfies. He satisfies not only our imagina- 
tions but our minds. He answers the questions 
which the intellect raises. He alone can sit in the 
night when the light is gone out of the sky and 
answer the soul’s question, ‘ How can these things 
be?’ In the days when he fought religious doubt 
and triumphed Horace Bushnell, thrusting his 
hands through his black, bushy hair, cried out des- 
perately, yet triumphantly, ‘O men! what shall I 
do with these arrant doubts I have been nursing 
for years? When the preacher touches the Trinity 
and when logic shatters it all to pieces, I am all at 
the four winds. But I am glad I have a heart as 
well as a head. My heart wants the Father; my 
heart wants the Son; my heart wants the Holy 
Ghost—and one just as much as the other.’ 

The Christian faith satisfies. It offers a resting 
place for our minds and there are many who, if 
they are to find rest unto their souls, must first of 
all discover intellectual rest. The heart cannot be 
at peace if the intellect is sailing the sea of doubt. 
It is our claim that Christianity is light for the 
mind as well as peace for the heart. 


62 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


A child in a foul stable, 

Where the beasts feed and foam, 

Only where He was homeless 

Are you and I at home; 

We have hands that fashion and heads that 
know, 

But our hearis-we lost—how long ago! 

In a place no chart nor ship can show 

Under the sky's dome. 


One of the greatest intellects the Church has ever 
known was Augustine, who formed and fashioned 
the theology of the Church for centuries. He was . 
a born philosopher. He read deeply into the 
philosophies of his age, and at last said, ‘In Cicero 
and Plato and other such authors I find many an 
acute saying, many a word that kindles the emo- 
tion, but in none do I find the words, Come unto 
me and I will give you rest.’ 

This is the Christmas message: the Gospel of 
Christ satisfies; and it is the recurring refrain of 
Chesterton’s verses. 


This world is wild as an old wives’ tale, 

And strange the plain things are, 

The earth is enough and the air is enough 

For our wonder and our war; 

But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings 
And our peace is put in impossible things 
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings 
Round an incredible star. 


THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS 63 


There never was a truer word than this: ‘ Our 
peace is put in impossible things.’ It is said of a 
great musician who, while visiting this country, was 
taken by his host to church. When the next Sun- 
day came around the invitation was renewed but 
the musician declined. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I will not 
go with you unless you can take me to hear some 
one who will tempt me to do the impossible.’ He 
was right. A religion that is on the level of man’s 
possibility is not worth bothering about. Our 
peace is found not in commonplace things, but in 
the impossible things where clash and thunder un- 
thinkable wings around an incredible star. Christ- 
mas gives us the pledge that nothing is impossible 
with God. 

This is the Christmas message: the Gospel of 
Christ satisfies. The House of Christmas is the 
true home of our hearts. There is no room for us 
in any of the inns of the world. On the tomb of 
Dean Stanley are engraven the words, ‘ The inn of 
a traveller on his way to the New Jerusalem.’ The 
heart’s true home is not found in any place or on 
any chart. As rivers run to the ocean and as fire 
ascends to meet the sun so do our souls, that come 
from God, press forward to rest in Him who is our 
home. 

Year by year at the Christmas season, men, 
women and children, rich and poor, young and old, 
increasingly find satisfaction in the music and the 


64 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


message of the Gospel. The very air is vocal with 
Fis praise and His name is on every tongue. It is 
the miracle of history. 


Lo an open house in the evening 

Home shall all men come, 

Lo an older place than the Eden 

And a taller town than Rome. 

Lo the end of the way of the wandering star, 
Lo the things that cannot be and that are, 
To the place where God was homeless 

And all men are at home. 


Sooner or later we must come to the end of the way 
of the wandering star. Sooner or later we all dis- 
cover the reality of the things that cannot be and 
are. Life without immortality cannot be content. 
In his old age Victor Hugo said: 


Winter is on my head and eternal spring is in 
my heart. The nearer I approach the end the 
plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies 
of the worlds which invite me. It is marvellous, 
yet simple. It is a fairy tale and yet it is history. 
For half a century I have been writing my 
thoughts in prose, verse, history, philosophy, 
drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, song; I have 
tried all. But I feel that I have not said the thou- 
sandth part of what is in me. 


Life without immortality cannot be content and 
immortality without Christ is empty. This is 
eternal life—to know God and Jesus Christ whom 


THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS 65 


He has sent. He is the home of our hearts, the 
refuge of our souls. One of the most appealing 
letters in all literature is a letter written by David 
Gray, a young Scottish poet. Educated for the 
ministry, he chose the life of a literary man but 
lost his health in poverty and loneliness in London, 
and died at the age of twenty-three. In his lone- 
liness he wrote: 


I am coming home—homesick. I cannot stay 
from home any longer. What’s the good of me 
being so far from home and sick and illP O God! 
I wish I were home never to leave it more! Tell 
everybody that I am coming back—no better: 
worse, worse. What’s about climate, about frost 
or snow or cold weather, when one’s at home? I 
wish I had never left it. . . . I have no 
money, and I want to get home, home, home. 


That is the cry of every soul. Let us arise and go 
to our Father, our heart’s true home. 


VI 
I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH 


ALAN SEEGER 


HERE is no other thing more worth think- 
ing about than faithfulness. Call it what 
you will, loyalty, faithfulness, truth, hon- 
esty, honour, sincerity, there is nothing higher or 
nobler than the quality of life these words pro- 
Claim. Faithfulness is fundamental. All the 
virtues of life and all the fine words that speak of 
love, faith, hope, gentleness, joy and peace are but 
beads strung on the string of a faithful life. Think 
what happens when this great quality fails. We 
have deception, hypocrisy, falsehood, deceit, fraud. 
We have a house built upon the sand, which the 
storms of life undermine and sweep away. When 
the prophet looked across the years to the coming 
of the Christ he declared that one would come the 
girdle of whose loins would be faithfulness. In my 
mail the other week, among the many letters from 
our radio friends, there is a letter from Iowa which 
says: 


I have been confined to my bed for three months. 
I suffer so much pain that I sleep very little, and 
66 


A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH — 67 


I pray to the Lord that if it be His will He would 
take me home. I have consecrated my life and all 
1 have to Him. 


There you have the heroic note. It is required 
of a man not that he be strong and healthy, or that 
he be wise or wealthy, but that he be faithful, and 
he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful 
also in much. 

This was the theme which Alan Seeger set to 
the music of beautiful words. He was a young 
American who, when the war broke out, felt the 
urge of duty so strong that he could not wait for 
America’s delayed entrance into the struggle, but 
crossed the sea and enlisted in the Foreign Legion 
of the French Army. 

Alan Seeger gave himself unreservedly to the 
great cause and fell with his face to the foe beside 
the Marne. It was while waiting to go into action 
that he wrote the words that must now be familiar 
to all who love the music of beautiful words: 


I have a rendezvous with Death 

At some disputed barricade ; 

When Spring comes back with rustling shade 
And apple blossoms fill the air— 

I have a rendezvous with Death— 

When Spring brings back blue days and fair. 


In the loveliness of the words we have both 
beauty and the beast, we have youth and life, love 


68 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


and spring, but we have also war and hate, death 
and defeat; yet the theme is victory and the cause 
triumphant. 

It is necessary, of course, that the cause to which 
one has plighted his faith should be one of high 
worth. There was no shadow of suspicion upon 
the spirit of this young American as to the cause 
which challenged his conscience. In these days, 
when the Great War is spoken about as civiliza- 
tion’s most colossal blunder, it is well for us, per- 
haps, to recall the spiritual passions that surged in 
the souls of those who made the supreme sacrifice 
that civilization might be saved for us who remain 
to criticize. It was not victory or adventure that 
lured this gallant soldier on. It was the righteous- 
ness of the cause for which he fought. Writing to 
his mother he said: 


The matter of being on the winning side has 
never weighed with me in comparison with that of 
being on the side where my sympathies lie. . . . 
There should really be no neutrals in a conflict like 
this, where there is not a people whose interests 
are not involved. 


From the trenches he wrote: 


You must not be anxious about my not coming 
back. The chances are about ten to one that I 
will. But if I should not, you must be proud, like 
a Spartan mother, and feel that it is your contribu- 


A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH — 69 


tion to the triumph of the cause whose righteous- 
ness you feel so keenly. Everybody should take 
part in this struggle which is to have so decisive an 
effect, not only on the nations engaged but on all 
humanity. There should be no neutrals but every 
one should bear some part of the burden. 


It was to this high ideal that he consecrated him- 
self and for which he gave the last full measure of 
his devotion. 

Let us look, then, at the principle which under- 
lies this true life. Fidelity, not freedom from 
danger or death, is life’s great compelling motive. 
‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee 
a crown of life.’ There is an increasing danger in 
this age of soft living that we get to look upon life 
as the greatest of all prizes and upon death as the 
greatest of all disasters. This young man loved 
life. He was only twenty-eight when he kept his 
rendezvous with death. He loved beauty. He 
longed for the springtime. He loved to see the 
flowers bloom. He was in love with beauty, with 
life itself. In these verses he says: 


It may be he shall take my hand 

And lead me into his dark land, 

And close my eyes and quench my breath— 
It may be that I shall pass him still. 

I have a rendezvous with Death 

On some scarred slope of battered hill, 
When Spring comes round again this year 
And the first meadow-flowers appear. 


70 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


There is something, however, worse than death, 
worse than suffering, worse than failure. Some- 
times it is better to die than to live. The great 
company of soldier dead thought so; the great army 
of martyrs thought so. In the Book of The 
Revelation there is a letter addressed to the 
Church at Smyrna. The Bishop of that church 
was Polycarp. He was a disciple of St. John, and 
there is in existence a letter which tells the story 
of his life and his fine death. Charged with being 
a Christian he was threatened with death unless 
he would recant. Undaunted he stood before his 
persecutors and challenged them to do their worst, 
saying, ‘Eighty and six years have I served my 
Lord, and He has done me no wrong. How, then, 
can I blaspheme my Lord who saved me?’ and 
there in the amphitheatre on Sunday, a spectacle to 
the great surging multitude, his spirit went up with 
the flames to God, and life and immortality 
crowned his sacrifice. There is something worse 
than death. No form of anemia is more weaken- 
ing than to say that there is nothing worth fighting 
for, nothing worth dying for. The world has 
always stood aside and will always stand aside for 
the men who have convictions and who are willing 
to go through hell for them. Men do not march to 
death for theories. They do not become martyrs 
for opinions. They do not suffer the loss of all 
things for a philosophy or some form of new 


A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH 71 


thought. It is conviction that counts, and the world 
will always make way for the man who suffers for 
truth’s sake. 

It was under deep conviction that Paul said: 
‘T hold not my life of any account as dear unto my- 
self, so that I may accomplish my course, and the 
ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to 
testify the gospel of the grace of God.’ It was 
under a deep conviction that Esther said, ‘I go 

and if I perish, I perish.’ It was under 
a deep conviction that the three exiles in Babylon 
said to Nebuchadnezzar the king, ‘O Nebuchad- 
nezzar, we have no need to answer thee in this 
matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is 
able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; 
and he will deliver us out of thy hand, O king. 
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we 
will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden 
image which thou hast set up.’ We remember how 
Jesus went up to Jerusalem with His face set, 
knowing what things would befall Him there, and 
knowing that He laid down His life voluntarily. 
‘T have power to lay it down,’ He said, ‘ and I have 
power to take it again.’ It was under deep convic- 
tion that saints and martyrs fought the good fight, 
finished their course, kept the faith and won their 
crown. 

If there is something worse than death there is 
also something better in life than comfort. Alan 


72 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


Seeger entered the War early. His first entry in 
his war diary is September 27, 1914; the last is 
dated June 28,1916. He had nearly two full years 
of war. He knew the courage that was necessary 
to face fatigue, discomfort and misery. 


God knows ’twere better to be deep 
Pillowed on silk and scented down, - 
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, 
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, 
Where hushed awakenings are dear 


Yet no word of complaint was uttered. Writing to 
his mother after he had been reported as killed or 
missing, he said: 


I can only say that I am perfectly content here 
and happier than I possibly could be anywhere 
else. Iwasa spectator, now I am an actor. 


This is the true secret and the true principle of life. 
In a recent book devoted to the study of the char- 
acter of Jesus the author labours to make out a 
case for the joyousness of the life of Christ. He 
argues and argues well that joy, not sorrow, is the 
dominant note in the life of our Lord. Neverthe- 
less he is wrong. Neither joy nor sorrow motived 
Jesus in His conduct or in His character. Joy and 
sorrow were but incidents in His path of duty. He 
Himself declared that He came to do the will of 
God, and if the doing of that will brought joy or 


A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH 73 


sorrow, it mattered not, faithfulness was everything 
to Him. ‘My meat,’ He said, ‘is to do the will 
of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work.’ 
It is to this high honour we are called. We, too, 
have a tryst to keep. We, too, have a rendezvous 
at some disputed barricade. ‘The battlefield with 
its scarred slopes and lurid skylines is only a mem- 
ory, but there is still fighting all along life’s 
frontier. The battlefield is where we find ourselves 
this very minute. The enemy is at our gates. If 
we listen we will hear the knocking. The attack 
is made upon the loyalties by which we live. 

There is the loyalty you owe yourself. You have 
a rendezvous with yourself, for the ‘first great 
work and task, performed by few, is that yourself 
may to yourself be true.’ The first question a 
man should ask himself every day of the year is 
‘Am I on good terms with myself?’ We are told 
that the mirror is the sacred symbol of Shinto. 
That is significant. The mirror reflects one’s ap- 
pearance, one’s personality, one’s soul, and it is a 
fine thing to be able to look into the mirror and 
say, ‘ Here stands a man who has kept faith with 
himself,’ for there is a certain sense in which the 
judgment seat of God is in a man’s own soul. 


I sent my Soul into the Invisible 
Some letter of that after-life to spell, 
And by and by my Soul returned to me 
And answered, ‘I Myself am Heaven and Hell.’ 


74 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


There is the loyalty you owe your own home 
and your own loved ones. I am speaking to not a 
few who know that things are not well behind the 
closed doors of their own home, and where there is 
a suggestion of disloyalty the flames shoot up as 
from hell itself. These are days when men and 
women and young people hold loosely to the stern 
domestic virtues of fidelity and loyalty upon which 
alone a home is surely and safely founded. You 
remember the story of Penelope. It is the finest 
story of loyalty I know. Ulysses, her soldier hus- 
band, had gone to the war and was given up as 
lost. Lovers came to seek her hand and she prom- 
ised to marry when the web at which she was 
weaving was finished. You remember that it was 
never finished. What was done in the day was 
unravelled at night and in that faith and loyalty 
she triumphed. In the truest sense she kept the 
faith, and what seemed to others as failure was to 
her victory. Surely, whatever obligation you have 
there is a rendezvous with those with whom you 
have plighted your troth, for better, for worse, for 
richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love 
and to cherish, till death you do part. Can you 
look into the face of your wife, your husband, your 
father, your mother, and say, ‘I to my pledged 
word am true’ ? 

There is the loyalty you owe to God. Some of 
you years ago gave Him your plighted word, but 
all you have now to give is your forgotten vows, 


A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH qs 


your broken promises. Some have been shirkers 
who have never acknowledged the obligation nor 
faced the flaming fact that sooner or later every 
broken vow and every disloyal act comes home to 
judgment and disputes life’s further advance. You 
cannot avoid that rendezvous with Death, and for 
my part it has only a passing interest, as it had to 
Alan Seeger, who, writing to his mother, said, 
‘Death is nothing terrible after all.’ If I were a 
poet I would like to change one word and say, ‘I 
have a rendezvous ’—not with death, and not with 
life, as some one has written—‘ with Christ.’ ‘I 
have a rendezvous with Christ at some disputed 
barricade,’ for in Him life is interpreted and death 
transformed. Will you keep a rendezvous with 
Him? I do not ask for loyalty to any argument, 
to any doctrinal interpretation, to any side of any 
religious controversy. I claim your loyalty to 
Him. If you have lost your way among the theo- 
logical discussions of our modern world I am chal- 
lenging you to loyalty to Him and to Him alone. 
If you can come only as a doubter, come, and like 
Thomas make the great discovery of faith. If you 
can come only as a penitent sinner, come, and like 
Peter, have your tears and your fears kissed away. 
If you can come only as a mourner, come, and like 
Mary Magdalene experience the presence of a liv- 
ing Redeemer. If you can come to Him only over 
the old, well-beaten path of old-fashioned faith, 
come. If you can come only as a modernist with 


76 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


your microscope in your hand, come, and He will 
Open your eyes to a beauty that no microscope can 
discover. 

For twenty years I have spent a few weeks of 
each summer in a little haven of rest on the Cana- 
dian side of Lake Erié. When we first started to 
go there the only way we could travel was by a 
dray horse over a rough and uncertain road, but 
the horse and cart brought us at last to the little 
haven of rest by the lake shore. Later a boat was 
built for traffic upon the river, and we could journey 
there for a price, a distance of some five miles. 
Sometimes the wind was contrary and the flat-bot- 
tomed boat was difficult to guide, but it brought us 
at last to the little haven of rest by the lake shore, 
and now in these modern days we can drive in a 
motor-car over a perfect road, and we come at last 
to the same little haven of rest with its glory and 
its dreams. The way we come has little to do with 
the joy and peace of that quiet place. Well, 
Christ, our Lord, is our haven of rest, and it mat- 
ters little how we come to Him as long as we come. 
We may come to Him with tears in our eyes, like 
the penitent and the prodigal, or we may come 
with laughter in our hearts like little children. 
Only let us come, and keep saying in our hearts: 


But I’ve a rendezvous with Curist, 


And I to my pledged word am true, 
I shall not fail that rendezvous. 


Vil 
RECESSIONAL * 


RUDYARD KIPLING 


P “HE easiest thing in the world is to forget. 
We could almost assent to the child’s defi- 
nition that memory is the thing we forget 

with. The easiest of all excuses is to say, ‘ I forgot.’ 

And yet it is one of the tragedies of life. There are, 

for example, old folks at home who have been for- 

gotten by children who have achieved success in 
the world. Christmas and New Year, perhaps, re- 
mind them of their obligations, but the days of the 
week and the weeks of the month, and the months 
of the year go by, and the old folks, if ‘not alto- 
gether forgotten, are ofttimes neglected. There is 
no more frequent theme in Scripture than the ease 
with which men forget God. Again and again God 
complains that He has been forgotten. It sounds 
as a lament on the lips of the prophets. Isaiah 
pleads with the people of Israel: ‘ Hear, O heavens, 

and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I 

have nourished and brought up children, and they 

have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his 
owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel 


* Recessional, Copyright, 1903, by Rudyard Kipling. 
sbi 


78 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


doth not know, my people doth not consider.’ 
Listen to the wail of Jeremiah: ‘ Be astonished, O 
ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye 
very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have 
committed two evils; they have forsaken me the 
fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cis- 
terns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.’ We 
could easily imagine God doing without us, but for 
men to do without Him, to forget Him, passes be- 
lief, and yet if we read history and if we know our 
Bible the commonest thing in the world is for men 
and nations to forget God. 

This was the sermon which Rudyard Kipling 
preached when he wrote the words of Recessional. 
The words are familiar and have become one of the 
hymns of the Church. When we talk about great 
preachers we forget the poets. If you wish to read 
the greatest sermon on family religion you must 
read Burns’ The Cotter’s Saturday Night. If 
you would read the greatest evangelistic sermon 
ever preached on conversion you must read John 
Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy. If you would 
read the finest discourse on immortality you must 
acquaint yourself with Tennyson’s Jn Memoriam. 
The greatest of all Christmas messages is found, 
not in volumes of sermons, but in Milton’s Ode to 
the Nativity. The greatest homily that was ever 
delivered on an outraged conscience was not de- 
livered by Augustine or Wesley or by any bishop, 


RECESSIONAL 79 


but by William Shakespeare in Macbeth, and the 
greatest of all sermons on patriotism, national loy- 
alty, integrity, and justice is to be found not in the 
orations of Daniel Webster or Henry Ward 
Beecher, but in these lines of Rudyard Kipling, 
the English poet. It is written in Biblical lan- 
guage: ‘ Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy 
God, in not keeping his commandments, and his 
judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee 
this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, 
and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; 
And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and 
thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that 
thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted 
up, and thou forget the Lord thy God.’ There are 
five verses in the poem and in each there is an ex- 
quisite phrase which proclaims a great moral truth. 

The first verse proclaims the central theme that 
God is the great Determiner of destiny. 


God of our fathers, known of old, 
Lord of our far-flung battle-line, 
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold 
Dominion over palm and pine— 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 

Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


The verses were written in 1897, the Diamond 
Jubilee year of the reign of Queen Victoria. There 


80 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


is a tradition to the effect that Kipling had written 
words which had about them the atmosphere of 
battle and the challenge of war, but a truer inspira- 
tion possessed him and he gave forth these simple 
verses which have since sung themselves into the 
heart of the English-speaking world. ‘The British 
Empire had made tremendous progress during the 
reign of the great English queen, and that progress 
has since continued. In the Exposition held a 
short while ago at Wembley there was a great elec- 
trically illuminated map in one of the government 
buildings. As you stood looking at it, suddenly 
the sign showed ‘ The British Empire Three Hun- 
dred Years Ago,’ and it showed a few lighted spots 
scattered over the world. ‘Then the sign changed 
and the words ‘ To-day ’ flashed upon the sign and 
it seemed as if there was a flash of light in every 
corner of the earth. The British Empire has been 
a greatly favoured one, and in celebrating her wide 
domain of empire the poet called attention not to 
battleships or far-flung flags, but to righteousness, 
and truth and God through whom the empire had 
achieved and maintained its greatness. A nation’s 
assets are not its material resources only, but its 
manhood. 

The lesson which Kipling enunciated for Britain 
is needed not less by America. For, to-day, Amer- 
ica stands among the nations a favoured people. 
Three hundred years ago she was nowhere. To- 


RECESSIONAL 81 


day she is everywhere. Her far-flung flag is upon 
the high seas and in the capitals of the world. We 
like to think that God has raised her up for a su- 
preme and gracious purpose, and that like Israel 
she is God’s messenger to the peoples of the world. 
Used rightly the consciousness of having a divine 
mission in the world may be of great service, but 
it is a very dangerous doctrine to proclaim. His- 
tory is full of examples of nations that have gone 
down to overthrow and ruin because they believed 
and acted on the belief that God had chosen and 
ordained them for some great mission in the world. 
The captain of the Assyrian hosts proclaimed that 
doctrine before the besieged people shut in behind 
the walls of Jerusalem, yet it was Assyria, and not 
Israel, that went down in crushing and ignomin- 
ious defeat. It was the same doctrine which finally 
brought disaster and overthrow upon Israel herself. 
Was she not chosen of God as the messenger of 
the Eternal among men? And yet God swept her 
from the page of history. In our own day we have 
heard that doctrine proclaimed by Germany. It 
was dressed up in religious robes and the German 
army went forth singing, A Mighty Fortress Is Our 
God. The ‘good old German God’ was appealed 
to and yet Germany was not saved from overthrow. 
In the early days of our republic, towards the end 
of his great life, Benjamin Franklin, at the age of 
eighty years, gave voice to this warning: 


82 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


I have lived a long time; and the longer I live, the 
more convincing proofs I see of His truth, 
That God Governs the Affairs of Men. 

And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without 
His notice, is it possible that an empire can rise 
without His notice? 

We have been assured in the sacred writings that 
except the Lord build the house, they labour in 
vain that build it. I firmly believe this; and I 
also believe that without His concurring aid, we 
shall succeed in this political building no better 
than the builders of Babel. 


The second verse follows through with the 
thought that true success is not found in militarism, 
but in righteousness, and that the secret of per- 
manency is the same for nations as for individuals. 
The secret of power is not the exertion or expres- 
sion of individual or national will, but the surrender 
of the will to God that He may work in us and 
through us. It is impossible for God to use a man 
or a nation that can get along without Him. If 
David is going to fight and conquer the blasphe- 
mous and outrageous giant he cannot do it in the 
armour of Saul. He must go in the simplicity of 
his shepherd’s coat and his sling and in the tre- 
mendous power of a living faith, and if God is go- 
ing to use a nation He must use one that is humble 
and teachable and sacrificial. One could almost 
think of God, as He looks upon our legislative mills 
grinding out law after law and regulation after 


RECESSIONAL 83 


regulation and battleship after battleship, saying 
as David said concerning Saul’s armour and arms 
—‘T cannot use them.’ 


The tumult and the shouting dies; 
The Captains and the Kings depart: 
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, 
An humble and a contrite heart. 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


The finest thing in a nation’s life, as in the life 
of an individual, is when that nation, humble and 
sacrificial, becomes an instrument in the hands of 
Almighty God. There have been times in the lives 
of every great nation when this has been so. The 
supreme moment in the life of Israel was when 
Israel, like a little child, in the moment of her 
greatest national crisis waited upon God, the king 
upon his knees, the people waiting breathlessly for 
the divine commission. The greatest periods in 
American history have not been those moments 
when the jingo spirit and the jazz spirit dominated 
the thought of the people, but when with humble 
and contrite heart the nation waited upon God as 
in the days of Lincoln, or in the days of the Great 
War, and knew that only His hand could save. 

It would seem sometimes as we read the history 
of our race that it is just the ebb and flow of a 
tidal movement, the rise and fall of nations, the 


84 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


coming and going of civilizations, and that all the 
pomp of yesterday becomes the rubbish heap of 
to-day. Our explorers are digging below the sur- 
face of the present and finding buried far beneath 
the gilded temples of a bygone age. We excavate 
among the tombs of the kings for the treasures of 
Egypt, and the great civilizations of Greece and 
Rome lie in ruins recovered only by the archzolo- 
gist and the explorer, and all their armies and 
navies have never been able to stem the advance 
of desolation. 


Far-called, our navies melt away; 

On dune and headland sinks the fire: 
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
Lest we forget—lest we forget! 


Sometimes we talk as if all that is necessary is to 
give our civilization to the world. We ought to 
know better. It will do the world no good to be 
westernized or Americanized, if it is not Christian- 
ized. The Word of God does not read, ‘ There is 
none other name under heaven given among men, 
whereby we must be saved, except the name of 
civilization or culture or Americanization.? The 
name that redeems and saves us is a divine name, 
the only name, the name of Him Who is King of 
Kings and Lord of Lords. 


RECESSIONAL 85 


The warning which Kipling proclaims is the 
same as that proclaimed in the words, ‘ Beware 
that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keep- 
ing his commandments, and his judgments, and his 
statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest 
when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built 
goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy 
herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and 
thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is 
multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou 
forget the Lord thy God.’ Nations in their pov- 
erty and in their feebleness have been loyal, but 
nations that have grown great and prosperous and 
wealthy have forgotten God, and the destruction 
that wasteth at noonday is upon them. The wine 
of prosperity has gone to their heads. 


If, drunk with sight of power, we loose 
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, 
Such boastings as the Gentiles use, 
Or lesser breeds without the law— 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forgei—lest we forget! 


In their poverty they remembered. In their wealth 
and prosperity they forgot. When a nation is 
young and emerging out of the shadows of obscur- 
ity it is beset with dangers and temptations that 
come from weakness and timidity, but the real 
dangers that come to a nation come when it has 


86 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


found for itself a place in the sun and has uncov- 
ered its strength. It was not when Rome was small 
and struggling that she stumbled, but when in her 
greatness she became arrogant and dared to make 
slaves her servants that she lost the power of self- 
mastery. There was a day when Spain had her 
treasure ships upon the high seas but in her great- 
ness irreverence and greed overthrew her. ‘There 
was a day when Germany was great, great in litera- 
ture, in music, in religion, in moral leadership, and 
then she sought her place in the sun, and, drunk 
with the sight of power, she loosed her legions upon 
the world. America to-day stands in the place of 
her greatest crisis, for greatness and wealth and 
prosperity are in danger of clouding her moral 
vision. And what is true of a nation is true also 
of the Church. Jesus was not afraid of small, 
poor churches. He was afraid of great, rich 
churches. He left no warning message for the 
poor, small church. It is the small, poor church 
that furnishes our theological seminaries and mans 
our missionary fields. Jesus was not afraid of 
weakness and poverty. He was afraid of the noon- 
day splendour, of the wasting destruction of suc- 
cess. It was at the closed door of a rich church 
that He stood waiting for entrance and saying, ‘ Be- 
hold, I stand at the door and knock,’ and His last 
message to that church was, ‘ Because thou sayest, 
I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need 


RECESSIONAL 87 


of nothing; and knowest not that thou art 
wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and 
naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in 
the fire, that thou mayest be rich, and white rai- 
ment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the 
shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint 
thine eyes with eyes alive that thou mayest see.’ 

In analyzing the character and public messages 
of Grover Cleveland and in trying to make an esti- 
mate of the background of his great life, his bi- 
ographer says, ‘ He frankly spoke old truths and 
pledged his honour to them.’ I think that same 
tribute might be paid to President Coolidge. It is 
given to him not to expound novelties but to speak 
old truths and to pledge his honour to them. And 
this is the poet’s theme: 


For heathen heart that puts her trust 

In reeking tube and iron shard, 
All valiant dust that builds on dust, 

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 
For frantic boast and foolish word— 
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord! 


Without religion there can be no enduring prosper- 
ity in life, in the social order or in the nation. It 
is a tried saying but it needs to be twice repeated 
that except the Lord build the house they labour 
in vain that build it. After a superficial sceptic 
had spoken slightingly of religion and its place in 


88 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


the life of the nation our own poet, James Russell 
Lowell, in memorable words oft repeated said: 


When the keen scrutiny of sceptics has found a 
place on this planet where a decent man may live 
in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and 
educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted, a 
place where age is reverenced, infancy protected, 
womanhood honoured, and human life held in due 
regard,—_when sceptics can find such a place ten 
miles square on this globe, where the Gospel of 
Christ has not gone before and cleared the way and 
laid the foundations that made decency and secur- 
ity possible, it will then be in order for these scep- 
tical literati to move thither and there ventilate 
their views. But so long as these men are depend- 
ent on the very religion which they discard for 
every privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate 
to rob the Christian of his hope and humanity of 
its faith in that Saviour who alone has given to 
men that hope of eternal life which makes life toler- 
able and society possible, and robs death of its 
terrors and the grave of its gloom. 


The question raises itself in the minds of all 
of us, ‘What can we do?’ ‘ What can I do?’ to 
the end that God may not be forgotten in the circle 
in which I move, in the home in which I live, and 
in the nation of which I am proud. Well, you can 
do the same thing that you do when any great 
question demanding decision is raised. You can 
vote. You can cast your vote and your influence 


RECESSIONAL 89 


for God. You can cast your vote for the recogni- 
tion of God in your home. You can cast your vote 
for obedience to the law of God in the nation. You 
can cast it for the Christian Sunday and for the 
Christian Church, and for that system of educa- 
tion in our schools and colleges that recognizes God 
and gives supremacy to the spirit of Christ. You 
can cast it for a simpler social order purified of 
the weakness which menaces the life of our people 
to-day. If you love your nation and if you love 
your own soul you will cast your vote every time 
the opportunity presents itself. You will strive to 
do what William Blake, another Christian English 
poet, said he would do in the face of all the worldly 
influences around him: 


Bring me my bow of burning gold! 
Bring me my arrows of desire! 

Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold! 
Bring me my chariot of fire! 


I will not cease from mental fight 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England’s green and pleasant land. 


VIII 


GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS 
INTO HEAVEN 


VACHEL LINDSAY 


P | AHERE is nothing in the Bible or out of it 
equal to the sublime beauty and majesty 
of a passage found in the Book of The 

Revelation which runs as follows: ‘ These are they 

which came out of great tribulation, and have 

washed their robes and made them white in the 
blood of the Lamb.’ Whatever we may say about 
ancient and modern poetry there is nothing in any 
literature that can stand beside this. Tennyson, 
who knew the music of words, said that it sur- 
passed in grandeur any writing he knew. No won- 
der Robert Burns, who, himself, has put words into 
immortal verse, confessed he could never read these 
verses without tears. George Matheson, the blind 
preacher and poet, has called the passage a great 
concert-hall full of singers, vocal with praise, the 
song of redemption being sung by a multitude 
which no man can number, and this is the song they 
sing, ‘Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and 
thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, 


be unto our God forever and ever. Amen.’ 
90 


BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN 91 


The passage is not only a great concert-hall; it is 
a great gallery full of both music and pictures. It 
contains the greatest of all our pictures of redemp- 
tion. Some of us have seen Michelangelo’s paint- 
ing of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel in 
Rome. What a marvellous and magnificent scene 
it is. The Judge is on His throne and before Him 
are gathered all nations, and justice is the word of 
the hour. Here, however, we have a magnificent 
picture of redemption. We see again the throne of 
God in the midst, and around it is gathered an in- 
numerable multitude, but the word of the hour is 
not justice but mercy, and from every heart the cry 
goes up, ‘ Salvation to our God which sitteth upon 
the throne, and unto the Lamb.’ 

Truly it is a great picture and redemption is its 
theme. Look at it a little in detail. We see a 
great company of the redeemed. ‘ These are they 
which came out of the great tribulation.’ They 
have been through the mill of affliction. They 
have been beaten as by a threshing instrument and 
have come through in triumph. ‘They are in white. 
‘They have washed their robes, and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb.’ Cleansed by the 
blood of Jesus Christ from every sin they wear the 
white garment of victory. It is a picture also of 
the redeemed life. They stand in the presence of 
the eternal God and at His right hand they discover 
pleasures forever more. There is no idleness here. 


92 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


They ‘ serve him day and night in his temple.’ No 
loneliness and no strangeness here. ‘ He that sit- 
teth on the throne shall dwell among them.’ ‘There 
is no hunger of the heart. ‘They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst any more.’ There is no with- 
ering of hope nor wearying of life. ‘ Neither shall 
the sun light on them, nor any heat.’ Best of all it 
is a picture of the Redeemer Himself, for we behold 
Him as the Saviour and Shepherd who leads unto 
fountains of the waters of life, and sorrow and 
sighing like birds of the night fold their wings and 
fly away. What a picture of redemption it is! 

It was William Cowper who sang, ‘ Redeeming 
love shall be my theme.’ It was his theme and 
now it is our theme. It is the theme of our hymns. 
It is the theme of the Bible. It is the theme of the 
Christian Church, and no church, no body of Chris- 
tians has been more loyal to that theme than the 
Salvation Army. When Christian experience grows 
pale and anemic the Church and the world turn 
again and again to the miracles of grace which have 
been wrought by the Gospel at the hands of the 
Salvation Army. It has waged an unyielding war 
against sin and shame in all parts of the world. It 
has literally descended into hell and made con- 
quests in the name of the Lord Jesus, and that is 
why I turn to Vachel Lindsay’s poem, General Wil- 
liam Booth Enters Into Heaven, for in it he has 
paid his tribute not only to the General, but to the 


BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN 93 


Gospel and has painted a never-to-be-forgotten pic- 
ture of redemption. 

It sets before us in a striking way a portrait of 
General Booth and the great army which he led out 
of the sin and the slums into the cleanness and the 
white robes of purity. The author has set the 
words to the music of the old Gospel hymn, ‘Are 
You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?’ It is 
suggested that the music begin with the bass drums 
and that the banjos and flutes be introduced later 
until the climax is reached in the grand chorus with 
all instruments in full blast, and closing quietly to 
the sound of singing unaccompanied. It is a rev- 
erent but real setting of the great central theme of 
Gospel redemption. 

Lindsay presents to us first of all a great 
preacher of redemption. General William Booth 
belongs to that multitude which no man could num- 
ber, but he was also born to lead. He was not a 
doctor of divinity or a bishop of any church. He 
was baptized into the Anglican Church, carried on 
his ministry in the Methodist and Congregational 
churches, and, in turn, was expelled from each. 
His ways were not their ways, but in the end his 
way brought him to victory. He has been called 
‘the man whom the churches missed,’ for he car- 
ried on his work outside of the churches and for a 
time had the opposition of the Church. His was a 
strong nature which needed freedom and room to 


94 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


act. He was born to lead, and leadership is sug- 
gested in the opening word of Mr. Lindsay’s poem 
which was written at the time of General Booth’s 
death and pictures him as entering at last into the 
heaven, where his heart had always been: 


Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
Lhe saints smiled gravely, and they said, 
“He’s come.’ 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


The words suggest the man and the message which 
he proclaimed. There was a note of heroism in 
the Gospel which he preached. His creed as out- 
lined by himself for use in the Salvation Army is 
refreshingly emphatic and eloquent in its simplicity. 
One of his last questions is, ‘Do you believe in 
hell? ’ and the answer given is, ‘ Yes, all the time.’ 
One of the first questions is, ‘When God forgives, 
does He pardon all at once? ’ and the answer, ‘ Yes, 
all at a stroke. It could not be otherwise. A 
thorough repentance brings complete forgiveness.’ 
General Booth preached a free and full salvation. 
Despised and rejected among men for his words 
and ways, he came at last through high resolve and 
Christian loyalty unto honour and his name was 
named among the great. No event in his stormy 
career revealed more clearly the quality of his life 


BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN = 95 


than when he received from the Mayor and Cor- 
poration of London the ‘freedom of the city.’ 
Standing among nobility he was as true to his mis- 
sion there as he was in the city slum. It was just 
after the Boer War and he told how during the 
siege of Ladysmith, when people were on the point 
of starvation, rich men met to distribute food to 
the hungry. There was difficulty about the distri- 
bution, but it was solved along denominational 
lines. The Episcopal clergyman stood up and said, 
‘All who belong to my communion, follow me.’ 
The Methodist, the Baptist, the Congregational, 
and Presbyterian ministers made similar announce- 
ments, ‘All who belong to my church, follow me.’ 
Then the Salvation Army captain said, ‘All you 
chaps who belong to nobody, follow me,’ and, turn- 
ing to the Lord Mayor, General Booth, with a fine 
courage, said, ‘And I would say here, if there are 
any chaps here on the platform, or off, who belong 
to nobody, I shall be very happy if they will follow 
me.’ What a setting for an artist! And this qual- 
ity of redemptive leadership clung to him to the 
last, and the poet makes us see it. 


Booth died blind, and still by faith he trod, 
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God. 
Booth led boldly and he looked the chief: 
Eagle countenance in sharp relief, 

Beard a-flying, air of high command 
Unabated in that holy land. 


96 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


Jesus came from out the Court-House door, 

Stretched His hands above the passing poor. 

Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there 

Round and round the mighty Court-House 
Square. 


It is a great picture of the redeemed. William 
Booth led a multitude of redeemed souls into the 
_ very presence of God. He did not go before the 
throne of God empty-handed. He did not go 
alone. When he went to heaven he found there the 
children of faith whom God had given him. 

When General Booth died not one, but scores 
and hundreds and thousands welcomed him to the 
home of the soul. It was a well-furnished heaven 
to which he went. Mr. Lindsay pictures that long 
retinue as he leads them round and round the 
Court-House Square of the Celestial City. 


Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, 

Lurching bravos from the ditches dank, 

Drabs from the alleyways and drug-fiends pale— 

Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail! 

Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath 

Unwashed legions with the ways of death— 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


Every slum had sent its half-a-score 

The round world over—Booth had groaned for 
more. 

Every banner that the wide world flies 

Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes. 


BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN 97 


Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang! 
Traced, fanatical, they shrieked and sang, 

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
Hallelujah! It was queer to see 
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free! 
Loons with bazoos blowing blare, blare, blare— 
On, on, upward through the golden air. 

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole! 
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl; 
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean, 
Rulers of empires, and of forests green! 
The hosts were sandalled and thew wings were 
fire— 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir. 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 
Oh, shout Salvation! It was good to see 
Kings and princes by the Lamb set free. 
The banjos rattled and the tambourines 
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens! 


It is a strange company. No more strange crowd 
was ever gathered under one banner. 


Yet in an instant all that blear review 

Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. 

The lame were straightened, withered limbs un- 
curled 

And blind eyes opened on a new sweet world. 


What is the meaning of it all? It means that the 
Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every 


98 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


one that believeth. It means that the Lord Jesus 
Christ still does what He once did. When He 
came on earth, He proclaimed in His very first 
sermon the reason of His coming. He came, He 
said, to preach the Gospel to the poor, to proclaim 
release to the captives, to recover the sight of the 
blind, to set at liberty them that were bruised, and 
when Christianity ceases to proclaim this message 
and to perform these miracles it will cease to be 
the religion of redemption. The evidence of the 
truth of Christianity is found not in logic but in 
life, and as far as my voice reaches over sea and 
land there are men and women and children who 
can stand up in answer to the call and say, ‘ He 
has redeemed me.’ Unbelief has no answer to such 
testimony. No one was ever scolded into the 
Kingdom, but people are led into that Kingdom by 
the hand of some one whom they trust and who 
knows in his own experience that Jesus Christ can 
make a man whole. 

It is a picture of the Redeemer. It is not the 
great multitude which no man can number which 
crowds the canvas. It is the Lord Himself upon 
whom the central light falls; it is General Booth’s 
Saviour and not General Booth that fills the poet’s 
page. It is the King and not the soldier to whom 
Heaven’s high homage is triumphantly given. 


And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer 
He saw his Master through the flag-filled air. 


BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN = 99 


Christ came genily with a robe and crown 
For Booth the soldier while the throng knelt down; 
He saw King Jesus—they were face to face, 
And he knelt a-weeping im that holy place. 
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? 


The song of praise is raised unto Him who 
washed us from our sins in His own blood and 
made us kings and priests unto God and His Fa- 
ther. Every eye is lifted unto Him and the song 
of praise is raised in His name. For years I have 
watched the development of the water power at 
Niagara. It has now become the greatest light- 
giving center in the world. Little by little the 
radius of its illumination has been extended. The 
towns around the Falls first commanded its flow 
and then the area widened and is still widening, 
and obscure villages and towns far removed from 
the sound of the cataract look up in acknowledg- 
ment of the radiance that floods the home and 
lights the street. The greatest light-giving center 
for the soul of man is Jesus Christ, and after nine- 
teen centuries the radiance of His illumination is 
still being enlarged, and people in obscure villages 
in Africa and in the Canadian northland look up 
and say, ‘In His light we see light.’ This is the 
Gospel which William Booth of the Salvation Army 
proclaimed, and it is the Gospel which the Church 
that found no room for him proclaims, for the Gos- 
pel is too big, too precious, too timeless, for any 


100 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


one denomination, and if the General himself were 
here I think 1 know what he would say. I am 
going to say it for him, for I owe something to him 
myself. 

Once he came to the students of the Toronto 
University and after he had taught us how to sing 
the Army songs and keep time with our hands he 
swung out the challenge, ‘ What are you going to 
do with your life?’ ‘That challenge has never been 
forgotten. He was not after preachers, or doctors, 
or teachers, or lawyers, but after preachers and 
teachers, doctors, and lawyers, who would dedicate 
their lives to Christ, the King, and I know if he 
were here now this would be his challenge, ‘ What 
are you going to do with your life?’ Then I would 
think he would add this, ‘If there is any one who 
does not belong to the Episcopal Church, or the 
Roman Catholic Church, or the Presbyterian 
Church, or the Baptist Church, or the Methodist 
Church, or to the fellowship of the Friends, or to 
any church, or to any creed, then let him follow 
me,’ and following that great, free, fearless spirit, 
he will be led into the presence of Christ the King. 


IX 
INVICTUS 


WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 


makes the remarkable claim that he had 

learned the secret of ‘contentment.’ ‘In 
whatsoever state I am,’ he said, ‘I have learned 
therein to be content.’ Such a statement presents 
a challenge to every one of us. What did Paul 
mean? Did he wish to convey the idea that he 
was satisfied? Did he wish to give the impression 
that he was in a state of complacency? ‘The word 
he uses for ‘ content’ is rather unusual and is used 
here and nowhere else in the New Testament. 

It is essential, therefore, that we first of all de- 
fine our terms, for there is a contentment that is 
born of the devil and despair. There is a content- 
ment that is the very negation of true Christianity. 
There is a contentment which is born of selfishness 
and which is the bane of educators and reformers, 
and allows impossible conditions to exist in our so- 
cial order. It permits the shame and the sin of 
our great cities to go unchallenged. It cries peace, 
peace when there is no peace. There is nothing 

101 


ie one of his prison letters the Apostle Paul 


102 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


the devil is so much in love with as peace. He is 
the father of all those who are satisfied to let well 
enough alone. Such a contentment defeats the 
very purposes for which Christ lived and died. 

Better far a divine discontent, a discontent that 
refuses to be satisfied with things as they are, and 
which calls upon all that is within a man to set 
things right. It answers the cry of the prophet, 
‘Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion: put 
on thy beautiful garments. O Jerusalem 
Shake thyself from the dust.’ 

The man who uttered the statement that in every 
circumstance in life he was content, did not mean 
that he had surrendered to the inevitable. He 
meant the very opposite. He meant that he had 
not surrendered and he never would surrender. He 
was no devotee of the listless life, nor of the apa- 
thetic temperament. He knew life and he had a 
right to speak. He was no young enthusiast, fol- 
lowing a gleam that was half mirage. He was in 
the prime of a noble manhood. He had been 
halted in his progress, disappointed in his plans. 
The despotic hand of Nero had laid hold on him 
and put him in prison. He was denied his liberty, 
held up in his plans, and faced defeat and death. 
Yet Paul, who suffered imprisonment, injustice, 
and cruelty, contended that he was content. 

What was he contented with? Was he con- 
tented with Nero’s tyranny? with his prison life? 


INVICTUS 103 


with his defeated purposes? Surely not. He 
prayed every day that God would set him free to 
live and to fight once more. What then did he 
mean? He meant that circumstances had not mas- 
tered him. He had mastered circumstances. He 
meant that in whatever state life found him he was 
never beaten, never whipped, never driven to the 
wall. He was the master of his fate. He was the 
captain of his soul. He was in control of himself, 
independent, self-sufficient, capable of being a 
freeman, even when he was in bondage. We see 
Napoleon, one of the greatest soldiers of all time, 
standing at the last within his lonely island prison, 
looking out over the waste of waters, his hands be- 
hind his back, a defeated and broken man. Cir- 
cumstances beyond his control had mastered him 
and life had been too much for him. 

But we see Paul, in his prison, challenging the 
world to do its worst. He held in his keeping the 
secret of success. Listen to his challenge. He 
tells us that he knows how to be rich and not be 
spoiled. He knows how to be poor and not to be 
dependent. He had learned the secret of mastery 
and knew how to be humbled without having his 
spirit broken, and how to be exalted without becom- 
ing vain. He had learned the secret of self-mas- 
tery, of self-sufficiency, of independence. He was 
not satisfied, but he was secure in his soul. He 
was on good terms with himself. His body was in 


104 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


prison, but his soul was free. I know of no one 
who so completely could have made his own the 
ringing words of William Ernest Henley’s poem, 
Invictus. | 


Out of the might that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 


In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
Uy head is bloody, but unbowed. 


Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the Shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. 


It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate: 

I am the captain of my soul. 


Sir James M. Barrie has told us how Henley 
came to write those stirring words. ‘The poet was 
a patient in the old Edinburgh Infirmary where he 
had gone in the forlorn hope of saving his foot. 
Lister, the eminent surgeon, received him with 
great kindness, and for twenty months he lay, 
sometimes in one public ward, sometimes in an- 


INVICTUS 105 


other. ‘It was desperate business,’ he wrote, ‘ but 
he saved my foot and here I am.’ It was in these 
circumstances that he wrote: 


It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate: 

I am the captain of my soul. 


There is a touch of pagan stoicism about these 
words. ‘They savour somewhat of arrogance, pos- 
sibly, and were not quite fulfilled in Henley’s 
tempted and tempestuous life. But Paul’s chal- 
lenge has never been gainsaid. Paul had learned 
the secret of self-control. 

He did not always possess it. At one time he was 
breathing out threatenings and slaughter against 
those who opposed him, and was exceedingly mad 
against all who differed from him, but now he had 
himself in hand, and come life, or death, blessing 
or cursing, he is master of his soul. How did he 
learn the secret? He tells us that he learned the 
secret of self-mastery from Jesus. ‘I can do all 
things through Christ who strengtheneth me.’ To 
be a master one has to have a master. This was 
what Emerson was trying to say in his great essay 
on Self Reliance. ‘Trust thyself, great men have 
always done so, believing that the Eternal was stir- 
ring at their heart, working through their hands, 
predominating all their being.’ Paul gave the 


106 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


Eternal a name. He called the Eternal, Christ. 
He believed that the Eternal Spirit of Christ moved 
at the very fountain springs of his life. He was 
the Lord’s freeman. The great passage in which 
Paul presents his challenge gives us the principles 
which enabled him to enter into the possession of 
that secret, pointing the way to spiritual suprem- 
acy. When Christ became his master Paul learned 
from Jesus three great triumphant principles. 

He learned from Jesus a true philosophy of life. 
His motto was, ‘ Rejoice in the Lord.’ He learned 
how to think in inclusive terms. No man can plant 
his feet firmly down without first being sure that he 
is not standing on a fog bank. The greatest need 
of the modern world is a working philosophy of life, 
and Paul learned that philosophy at the feet of 
Jesus. It was a simple philosophy, but it was pro- 
found enough to touch the deep places of human 
sin and human sorrow. At the Cross of Christ he 
learned that sin was real, but from the risen Christ 
he learned that righteousness and truth were su- 
preme, and so Paul wrote: ‘ Be anxious for noth- 
ing, but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiv- 
ing let your requests be made known unto God, and 
the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, 
shall keep guard over your hearts and your 
thoughts in Christ Jesus.’ His philosophy of life 
enthroned God, and brought Him into touch with 
every circumstance and condition in his life. Paul 


INVICTUS 107 


learned from Jesus that nothing touched him which 
could be outside the plan and purpose of God. 
Everything, even his prison experience, was so in- 
terwoven into the warp and woof of his life that all 
things were bound to work together for good. 

‘Spurgeon tells of a farmer who had on the weather 
vane of his barn the motto, ‘ God is love.’ He was 
asked if the motto was intended to suggest that 
God was as changeable as the wind. ‘O, no,’ said 
the farmer, ‘it means that whatever way the wind 
blows, God is love.’ That is the secret of content, 
of a quiet heart, of self-mastery. The man who 
knows that all things work together for his good, 
and that nothing can separate him from the love of 
God, is beyond the reach of circumstances, and has 
in his keeping the secret of a victorious life. He 
has learned the philosophy of Providence that 
nothing can touch him that is outside of the plan 
of God. 

In the second place he possessed through Christ 
anew perspective of life. His motto, oft-repeated, 
contains the words, ‘ The Lord is at hand.’ Upon 
the horizon he saw the glory of the coming of the 
Lord. It is perspective that makes life beautiful. 
Perspective is an artist’s word. It calls for depth 
and distance and direction. Early art was super- 
ficial and revealed only a surface view. True art 
has depth and distance, and reveals the far-off 
vistas. ‘True art has perspective, and what is life 


108 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


but the truest and highest of arts? The true life 
has depth and distance, and ‘ believes in the cen- 
turies against the hours.’ Time is always on the 
side of truth, for a ‘ thousand years in God’s sight 
are but as yesterday, and as a watch in the night.’ 
God does not pay at the close of every day, but in 
the end He pays,’ said Anne of Austria to Riche- 
lieu. ‘ He that sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit 
reap eternal life.’ The man who has this hope can 
possess his soul in patience and say with the 
apostle, ‘The Lord is at hand.’ Such a view of 
life gives purpose and significance to minor events 
and steels the soul for any sacrifice. It enables a 
man to lift his eyes to the hills which rise beyond 
the range of other men to behold the King in His 
beauty and the land that stretches afar. It is not 
Nero upon the imperial throne of Rome that he 
sees. It is the Lord of all the centuries, high and 
lifted up, that fills his vision. He does not see be- 
yond him what Henley spoke of as ‘ the Horror of 
the Shade,’ but the glory of life eternal and, believ- 
ing in deathless life, he was invincible. 

In the third place he received from Jesus a new 
psychology. Jesus taught Paul how to think and 
what to think about. Was he thinking of his 
prison? Of Nero’s injustice? Of the inevitable 
sentence of death? No, he was thinking of other 
things. He was thinking not of defeat and death, 
but of victory. He was thinking not of Nero on 


INVICTUS | 109 


his throne, but of the Eternal God. He was think- 
ing not of his enemies, but of his friends, who were 
even then ministering to his necessity, and whose 
kindness had warmed his heart. Therein lies one 
of the secrets of self-mastery. We hear in our day 
a good deal about the power of mental suggestion, 
and the influence of subconscious thought. Paul 
long ago gave us the true principles of that philos- 
ophy, and he gave it adequate expression in unsur- 
passed language, ‘Whatsoever things are true, 
whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever 
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- 
ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good 
report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any 
praise, think on these things.’ He would have us 
lift up our hearts, and our eyes unto the Lord, to 
set our affections upon things above, and to bring 
our thoughts unto captivity to our great Captain, 
Christ. 

These, then, are the principles learned from 
Jesus which make for self-mastery, a true and ade- 
quate philosophy of life, which sets God, the God 
of life and love, upon the central throne, a fine and 
beautiful perspective of life which brings the far-off 
near, and reveals events and happenings in their 
true perspective, and the possession of a true men- 
tal program, by which thought and imagination are 
controlled and brought into the service of the soul. 
These principles may be found reflected in many 


110 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


quarters, but they are found perfected in the pres- 
ence of Jesus. The secret of mastery is learned 
from the Master Himself. 

We are told on all hands that we are living to- 
day in a new world, and the most vital question 
that the preacher is called upon to answer is this: 
‘Is the Gospel of Jesus Christ sufficient for this 
new world?’ Will it do for the twentieth century 
what it did for the first century? Has not modern 
psychology made man his own captain? We are 
told that a man has within him a sufficient source 
of surplus power to supply all his need. Person- 
ality, we are being told, is the great untouched res- 
ervoir of sufficiency. There are within each one of 
us, as there is in the earth, stores of hidden energy 
waiting to be discovered. Just as the reserves of 
an army are hidden till a crisis comes and the 
sources of renewed power in the earth await the 
call of spring so do the spiritual energies of the soul 
wait upon the call of the consciousness to bring 
them into play.) We believe in all this modern psy- 
chology. Paul believed in it in his own way, but 
that was not the secret of his self-sufficiency. In- 
stead of curing restlessness and the hunger of the 
heart, one is apt to bring on an attack of nervous 
prostration by saying over and over again, ‘ Every 
day in every way I am getting better and better,’ 
for it is as dangerous to deceive oneself as to lie to 
some one else. Paul indeed found within himself 


INVICTUS 111 


the secret of his sufficiency, but he did not supply 
that need. He said, ‘My God shall supply every 
need according to his riches in glory, in Christ 
Jesus.’ ye He had learned the secret from Jesus 
Himself, who said, ‘ He that drinketh of the water 
that I shall give him shall never thirst, for the 
water that I shall give him shall become in him a 
well of water springing up into eternal life. If any 
man thirst let him come unto me and drink.’ 

I have heard of a celebrated musician who was 
able to play cathedral music on a little cabinet or- 
gan that stirred the hearts of all who heard it. It 
is always a master that we need, and there is only 
one Master who is sufficient for our demands. 
With His hand upon our lives, we can face the 
world with confidence. With Him at our side each 
of us may be able to say: 


It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 
Curist is the Master of my fate, 

Curist is the Captain of my soul. 


Xx 
EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 


WILLIAM HERBERT CARRUTH 


ELIGION is one of the facts of life. It is 
R one of the facts of human experience. It 
is one of the facts with which science has 
to deal, for there are other facts than those which 
our eye sees and our hand handles. There are as- 
tronomical facts and biological facts, mental, moral 
and spiritual facts which must not be passed by, 
and one of the outstanding scientific facts with 
which we have to deal is the fact of religion. There 
is no doubt about the fact. In his study of the 
primitive instincts of the American Indian, Long- 
fellow discovered the facts, and placed upon those 
facts his own interpretation: 


Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, 
Who have faith in God and Nature, 
Who believe, that in all ages 

Every human heart is human, 

That in even savage bosoms 

There are longings, yearnings, strivings 
For the good they comprehend not, 
That the feeble hands and helpless, 
Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Touch God’s right hand in that darkness 
And are lifted up and strengthened. 


112 


EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 113 


There is no doubt about the facts. No one 
doubts that people everywhere know something 
about penitence, pardon, peace, prayer, and the 
presence of the Eternal. We differ when we at- 
tempt the interpretation of the facts. 

Psychology seems to think it has disproved cer- 
tain spiritual experiences when it has interpreted 
them in the light of their origin. There are in hu- 
manity instincts which link man with the lower 
orders of creation, but there are also instincts which 
relate him to the heavenly order. Is there any rea- 
son why we should interpret the facts of sex and 
hunger and thirst as relating man to a real world 
and refuse to interpret the facts of religious experi- 
ence, faith, hope, love, prayer and penitence as 
bringing man into fellowship with God? If there 
is satisfaction for man’s hunger in the universe of 
which he is a part, there is also some heavenly 
manna provided for the deeper hunger of his soul. 
If there is bread that comes from wheat there is 
also bread that comes from God. The facts of spir- 
itual experience which fill the world cannot be 
doubted. Men do pray. Men do feel after God. 
Men do experience conversion. But, says the ma- 
terialist, all these facts can be explained just as the 
thunder can be explained. They are the product of 
natural causes. They come out of the physical uni- 
verse. No, says the idealist, they are the product 
of mental and psychical processes. They come be- 


114. THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


cause of some angel’s touch. They belong to the 
mystical and spiritual, but they have no definite re- 
lation to a personal God. The Christian interpre- 
tation, however, relates religious experiences to God 
as the author. God speaks but some fail to un- 
derstand and miss the message, while others have 
ears to hear. 


Where I heard noise and you saw flame 
Some one man knew God called his name. 


The fact is not in dispute. The interpretations 
may differ, but only one interpretation can answer 
to the fact. 

This is the theme of a short poem of four verses 
by William Herbert Carruth. The poem is called 
Each in His Own Tongue and is known wherever 
the language in which it is written is known. The 
poem admits the facts of life and shows that men 
have differing interpretations of the same experi- 


ence. 
In the first verse the poet presents to us in brief 


but beautiful form the facts of the progress and 
order of the material world. He gathers the 
geological and biological facts which the science of 
the naturalist has gathered: 


A fire-mist and a planet,— 
A crystal and a cell,— 
A jellyfish and a saurian, 
And caves where the cave-men dwell; 


EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 115 


Then a sense of law and beauty, 

And a face turned from the clod,— 
Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God. 


The facts cannot be gainsaid. There is progress, 
order, development in the world. Like Napoleon 
we point to the stars of the sky, and say, ‘ Who 
made all these? ’ and the poet answers: 


Some call it Evolution 
And others call it God. 


That, however, is poetry. ‘The answer of pure 
prose is ‘ God working in evolution.’ Of itself evo- 
lution is nothing. It is a word. It is a word to 
describe God’s way of doing things. Evolution of 
itself is helpless, evolution is merely a word to 
describe how God works. He begins at the be- 
ginning. He begins with a world that is waste and 
void and dark, but upon the face of the deep His 
Spirit broods and out of the chaos and confusion, 
order and a beautiful universe come in God’s good 
time. It is God’s way. ‘ First the blade, then the 
ear, then the full corn in the ear.’ 

In the second verse the facts of beauty are 
presented to us. In the universe of the spirit there 
are three great worlds: the world of truth, the 
world of goodness, the world of beauty. Science 
tells us that the eye never perceived the beauty of 


116 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


the world until the microscope revealed it. How 
marvellously beautiful is the world in which we 
live: the snow crystal, the dewdrop, the heather 
bell, the flower that is born to blush unseen, the 
soit green shade of the grass, the brilliant glory of 
autumn, these facts thrill our spirits. Why do 
they thrill and stir us so? No lovelier setting was 
ever made for beauty than in the verse which re- 
flects the beauty, not of California, nor of the 
sunny south, but of Kansas, where he was when 
he wrote the words; for Kansas, some of us know, 
has beauty unrivalled: 


A haze on the far horizon, 
The infinite, tender sky, 
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields, 
And the wild geese sailing high,— 
And all over upland and lowland 
The charm of the goldenrod,— 
Some of us call it Autumn 
And others call it God. 


Again we answer that it is not a choice between 
autumn and God, for autumn itself is God’s handi- 
work. Beauty is the garment of God. We too 
often forget that beauty is an attribute of God 
Himself. ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of 
holiness.’ It was a true instinct that has led the 
people of all the world to make their places of 
worship beautiful, and it was the leading of the 


EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 117 


Spirit of God that has made the Church the mother 
of the fine arts, of painting, of sculpture, and of 
music. What is the most beautiful thing in the 
world? I will tell you. It is not of earth or sea 
or sky or air. It is the face of some one you love. 
It may be the wrinkled face of age, or the dimpled 
face of childhood, and the glory of God that shines 
in the face of Jesus is the most beautiful thing in 
the world. 


I know what beauty is, for Thou 
Hast set the world within my heart; 
Of me Thou madest it a part; 

I never loved it more than now. 


But I leave all, O Son of man, 
Put off my shoes, and come to Thee, 
Most lovely Thou of all I see, 

Most potent Thou of all that can! 


In the third stanza the poet presents to us the 
fact of human aspiration. The outstanding fact of 
our humanity is that we aspire. The question is 
in all our hearts, ‘What lack I yet?’ In one of 
the great books on religion these words are to be 
found: ‘If the gods went their way and were sat- 
isfied and the beasts went their way and were sat- 
isfied, the unrest of man can only mean that he is 
not rightly related to his present life.’ That is so. 
These strong yearnings and longings of the soul 
are facts. They are facts subject to verification as 


118 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


are the facts of physics or of chemistry. They can 
be tested in the laboratory of experience and are re- 
peated in every age and in every land. Weare not 
satisfied; we aspire, we hope, we look up, we pray. 
What is the explanation? 


Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
When the moon 1s new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in,— 
Come from the mystic ocean, 
Whose rim no foot has trod,— 
Some of us call it Longing, 
And others call tt God. 


To call it Longing leaves the mystery where it was, 
but to call it God satisfies. The longing that stirs 
at our hearts is the hunger of the soul for bread, 
the thirst of the spirit for the water of life. ‘ Thou 
hast made us for Thyself, O God,’ said Augustine, 
‘and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.’ 
It is even so. Our hearts cry out for the living 
God. Show us the Father and we will be satisfied. 
In the fourth stanza we are brought face to face 
with the challenging facts of duty, of moral obli- 
gation, of the thundering voice of conscience. 
Kant, the philosopher, said there were only two 
massive facts in the universe, one the starry heav- 
ens without, and the other the moral law within. 
The facts are written on every page of history: 


EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 119 


A picket frozen on duty,— 
A mother starved for her brood,— 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
And Jesus on the rood; 
And millions who, humble and nameless, 
The straight, hard pathway plod,— 
Some call it Consecration, 
And others call it God. 


It cannot be doubted, of course, that men with- 
out consciously acknowledging God have faced 
death for duty’s sake. There are many who are 
hesitant to admit this. There were many and 
there are still some who could not follow John 
Hay’s eulogy on Jim Bludso: 


He seen his duty, a dead sure thing, 
And went for it thar and then, 

And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard 
On a man that died for man. 


Still the roots of duty are buried deep. The hid- 
den springs of conduct are in the dark, deep re- 
cesses of the soul, and men are motived by influ- 
ences they cannot define, for we live and move and 
have our being in God. Surely it is the simplest, 
as it is the most profound, of all interpretations to 
say that the voice of conscience is the voice of 
God in the soul of man. Duty that roots itself in 
any sort of a physical or psychological ‘ complex ’ 

speaks not in thunder but in whispering reminis- 


120 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


cence. Certainty and conviction come to men who 
believe that in their conscience there is a com- 
mand, prefaced with the mandate, ‘ Thus saith the 
Lord.’ 

This, then, is the problem we face. The facts 
are plain. How shall we interpret them? In the 
days of the early Church people of all lands gath- 
ered in Jerusalem and there came face to face with 
facts. Each man heard in his own tongue the 
wonderful words of God. That is the incident 
which gave Mr. Carruth the title and perhaps the 
thought of his poem, Hack in His Own Tongue. 
There were many interpretations as usual. Some 
said wine. These men were drunk. That is 
surely the last limit to which materialism could go. 
No, neither the wine of life nor the wine of sci- 
ence was the true interpretation. The explanation 
was Christ. Christ was speaking, Christ was 
working. Christ was filling the world with His 
Spirit. That is the explanation. ‘God was in 
Christ.’ There you find the secret of order, and 
the mastery of nature. There you find beauty un- 
surpassed. In Him all our restlessness is hushed, 
the hunger of the heart satisfied. ‘There you find 
duty sublimed into devotion, for did not He say, 
‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least 
of these, ye have done it unto me’? Christ speaks 
in every man’s tongue, and in a friendly letter 
written by Mr. Carruth he himself suggests that 


EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE 121 


only Christ can interpret and satisfy. He is think- 
ing of our restless, storm-tossed world. He writes: 


World ruin it seems to the spoiler, 
To the prophet a new age begun, 
For the burden-bearer and toiler 
Are taking their place in the sun. 
So fear not, tho’ palaces totter 
And the scheme of the Past is unmade; 
The voice that stilled Galilee’s water, 
Calms the tempest so: ‘ Be not afraid.’ 


Israel Zangwill has been telling the American 
people that Christianity is bankrupt. Well, it is 
not Christianity but men’s interpretations that are 
bankrupt. Christianity can never be bankrupt for 
all the riches of grace and glory are in Christ Jesus. 
The inexhaustible riches of Christ are ours. Think 
of that! We know from the microscope something 
of the inexhaustible riches of the earth. We know 
from the telescope and the spectroscope the inex- 
haustible riches of the sky, and in Christ Jesus, the 
express image of God, the very effulgence of His 
glory, we know the inexhaustible riches of life here, 
and in the land beyond the border. ‘In Him all 
things hold together.’ 


XI 
THE EVERLASTING MERCY 


JouHN MASEFIELD 


7 NAHE problem of religion is not to find 

mercy. That is not the problem. The 

Bible is very emphatic on that point. 
God’s mercy is everlasting. ‘Thy mercy, O Lord, 
is in the heavens.’ ‘Thou, Lord, art good and 
ready to forgive, and plenteous in mercy to all 
them that call upon thee.’ ‘ But thou, O Lord, 
art a God full of compassion, gracious, long-suffer- 
ing, and plenteous in mercy and in truth.’ ‘The 
Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and 
plenteous in mercy.’ Take your Bible and see that 
this is the refrain from beginning to end. ‘ The 
mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlast- 
ing.’ 

The problem of religion is not to find mercy. 
The problem is to find penitence. ‘ Return unto 
me and I will return unto you, saith the Lord.’ His 
banner is always flung to the breeze and on it are 
imprinted the words, ‘ He will abundantly pardon.’ 
It is over impenitence that the Saviour weeps. ‘O 
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the prophets, and 
stoneth them that are sent unto her! How often 

122 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 123 


would I have gathered thy children together, even 
as a hen gathereth her own brood under her wings, 
and ye would not.’ When the prodigal said, ‘I 
will arise and go to my father,’ he found that his 
father met him with the robe and the ring and the 
royal welcome. When the publican fell upon his 
face and said, ‘ Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner,’ 
he arose and went down to his home justified by 
the grace of God. 

No more pathetic and tragic picture of human 
sin was ever penned than was penned by John 
Masefield in The Everlasting Mercy. Saul Kane, 
of whom the story is told, was everything he ought 
not to be. Even as a lad he bit his father’s hand 
and broke his mother’s heart. He was a drunkard, 
a libertine, coarse in every fiber of his being, a 
human wreck, a piece of immoral driftwood in the 
cross-currents of the world. He lived, he said, ‘ in 
disbelief of heaven.’ He drank; he fought; he 
poached; he cursed, and nineteen times he went to 
jail. Yet this man found mercy and light and pu- 
rity. He became so pure in heart by the grace of 
God that his last words sang of purity: 


O lovely lily clean, 
O lily springing green, 
O lily bursting white, 
Dear lily of delight, 
Spring in my heart agen 

~ That I may flower to men. 


124 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


He came to Christ in his sin and shame, just as he 
was. It was a change, sudden, revolutionary, 
transforming. In his own language something 
broke inside his brain. Old things passed away 
and all things suddenly became new. 

As a matter of fact, however, there is no such 
thing as a sudden conversion. If we have eyes to 
see and ears to hear we will discover that God has 
been preparing the soul in a marvellous way for its 
great discovery. If we could tell the tale of the 
thief on the cross we would discover a mother’s 
love, a sensitive conscience, a slumbering sense of 
the spiritual, a movement of the Spirit of God upon 
his spirit. It was so with the Apostle Paul. The 
Master he met on his way referred to the struggle 
that had been going on in his soul when He said, 
‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’ 
It was so with Saul Kane. While the story told in 
the poem rolls on like the tide yet the experiences 
are clear and plain. 

We see him at a prizefight, a beastly and brutal 
affair. Even he, who was so used to brutality, sick- 
ened at the sight. 


The five and forty human faces, 
Inflamed by drink and going to races, 
Faces of men who'd never been 
Merry or true or live or clean. 


The man with whom he fought was a partner in 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 125 


crime with himself but in this instance was in the 
right, and Saul Kane knew that he himself was in 
the wrong. 


‘I’m fighting to defend a lie. 
And this moonshiny evening’s fun 
Is worse than aught I’ve ever done.’ 


This is the first awakening of his conscience, the 
first pang that pierced his spirit. 

After the fight was over in which he was victor, 
the crowd followed him to the public house, and 
spent the night in a drunken debauch. The scene 
pictured is well-nigh unspeakable, and while he not 
only participated in it but led and dominated it, his 
soul somehow revolted at the filth and shame of 
it all. In the night he rose from his place among 
the sleeping comrades of his shame and sin and 
went to the window for a breath of air. 


I opened window wide and leaned 

Out of that pigstye of the fiend 

And felt a cool wind go like grace 

About the sleeping market-place. 

The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly, 
The bells chimed Holy, Holy, Holy. 


The night air and the cool wind cleared his brain 
and he began to think. It was better for him to 
die than live. Death ended all anyway, he said. 


= 


126 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


“And no one lives again, but dies, 
And all the bright goes out of eyes, 
And all the skill goes out of hands, 
And all the wise brain understands, 
And all the beauty, all the power 
Is cut down like a withered flower. 
In all the show from birth to rest 
I give the poor dumb catile best.’ 


The suggestion of suicide came to him but he put 
it away and in a fury of madness, half-naked, fled 
into the night with two brass lamps burning in his 
hand, and as he ran he cried, ‘I am Satan, newly 
come from hell.’ He spied the fire bell, and tak- 
ing the rope in his hand he rang the bell until the 
town was all astir and then he fled from the pur- 
Suing crowd and hid himself in the dark recesses 
of the tavern. When he emerged in the morning 
he met the old minister of the town whom he 
charged with cant, hypocrisy and worldliness. 


For you take gold to teach God’s ways 
And teach man how to sing God’s praise. 
And now I'll tell you what you teach 

In downright honest English speech. 


The old parson did not argue with him. Argument 
in religion never gets very far, and the minister is 
wise who avoids it. It only confirms people in 
their own opinions, but he did put a question to 
this half-crazed, half-drunken man: 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 127 


‘Then, as to whether true or sham 
That book of Christ, Whose priest I am; 
The Bible is a lie, say you, 
Where do you stand, suppose it true?’ 


This is the issue. ‘Tell me, where do you stand? 
Supposing all that the Bible says of sin, of judg- 
ment, and of Christ and the Cross is true, where do 
you stand? Saul Kane paused to think and a sec- 
ond time the Spirit of God knocked at the closed 
door of his life. 

Looking for trouble, and searching for his com- 
panion in sin, he wandered off to the edge of the 
village, but finally returned to the lighted market- 
place where he spied a little lad crying because his 
mother had whipped him and left him standing in 
the street to wait for her return. There was some- 
thing in Saul Kane that responded to the sorrow 
and appeal of the little child. 


‘Each one could be a Jesus mild, 
Each one has been a little child, 

A little child with laughing look, 

A lovely white unwritten book; 

A book that God will take, my friend, 
As each goes out at journey’s end,’ 


The neighbours were horrified, however, to see the 
lad enjoying the company of the town derelict and 
when the boy’s mother returned in a torrent of pas- 
sionate entreaty and reproach she poured out her 


128 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


soul in sorrow and fear for the boy that was still 
left to her and had now like the rest, as she 
thought, taken the road to hell. He was smitten 
in his soul. 


I'd often heard religious ranters, 

And put them down as windy canters, 
But this old mother made me see 
The harm I done by being me. 


There was nothing to do but to drown his thought 
and remorse in drink. ‘That is always the coward’s 
way. Afraid to face himself he administered to 
himself a temporary anesthetic. In the dirty drink- 
ing and gambling den he stood again in the crowd 
and called on all to drink with him. Nevertheless, a 
strange feeling dominated and possessed him, and 
the scathing, scorching words of the mother were 
burning in his soul and he kept saying to himself, 
‘What has come to me to-night?’ Within an hour 
he knew. As he afterwards said: 


Our Fates are strange, and no one knows his; 
Our lovely Saviour Christ disposes. 


Into the disgusting place a young woman with a 
pure soul and a sweet face came. She was well 
known, for she always made the rounds of the 
drinking-dens before the closing hour, and in her 
Quaker dress, and with her winsome grace there 
was none that did not listen and none that did not 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 129 


reverence her. This night, however, Saul Kane 
was mad, and called upon her to lead them in the 
song. She stepped up to him, refusing to be in- 
sulted and, looking him in the face as if her very 
spirit cried, she said: 


‘Saul Kane, she said, ‘when next you drink, 
Do me the gentleness to think 
That every drop of drink accursed 
Makes Christ within you die of thirst, 
That every dirty word you say 
Is one more flint upon His way, 
Another thorn about His head, 
Another mock by where He tread, 
Another nail, another cross. 
All that you are is that Christ’s loss,’ 


Then it was that something broke inside his brain. 
One of the songs he called for was, ‘Oh, who is 
that knocking at the door?’ Some one now in- 
deed and in truth was knocking. The crowd had 
been turned out and the public house was closed, 
but he was standing alone with her beside the door. 
She was searching his face for she knew the ever- 
lasting mercy of God that could save unto the ut- 
termost. Suddenly she turned and said, ‘ He waits 
until you knock,’ and in a moment was gone. 
Alone in the night he stood. The Great Searcher 
had found him at last and from Him he could no 
longer flee. God had discovered his hiding place 


130 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


and a voice bayed like bloodhounds in his head, 
and this is what it said: 


‘The water's going out to sea 
And there’s a great moon calling me; 
But there’s a great sun calls the moon, 
And all Goa’s bells will carol soon 
For joy and glory and delight 
Of some one coming home to-night.’ 


Then the miracle of miracles took place. No 
miracle performed in the world of things can com- 
pare with one perfected in the realm of the Spirit. 
His very soul cried out and in a moment the old 
garments of his filthy life fell from his soul and 
he stood clothed in his right mind and in the pure 
linen of a right life. 


I did not think, I did not strive, 

The deep peace burnt my me alive; 

The bolted door had broken in, 

I knew that I had done wnth sin. 

I knew that Christ had given me birth 

To brother all the souls on earth, 

And every bird and every beast 

Should share the crumbs broke at the feast. 


This is always the way. It is not our striving but 
God’s seeking that brings the great salvation. 

Two things immediately followed. The world 
became a new world to Saul Kane. The same old 
world that had been coarse and cruel became sud- 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 131 


denly sweet and beautiful, for the world is like a 
mirror and reflects our own thoughts and our own 
souls. Saul’s clouded, sin-stained mind had seen 
only hopelessness and despair. Now his mind il- 
lumined by the light of God saw beauty and peace 
everywhere: 


O glory of the lighted mind. 

How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind. 
The station brook, to my new eyes, 

Was babbling out of Paradise, 

The waters rushing from the rain 

Were singing Christ has risen again. 

I thought all earthly creatures knelt 
From rapture of the joy I felt. 


Everything in heaven became a symbol to him of 
the spiritual. He saw a meaning in life that he 
had hitherto missed: 


All earthly things that blesséd morning 
Were everlasting joy and warning. 
The gate was Jesus’ way made plain, 
The mole was Satan foiled again, 
Black blinded Satan snouting way 
Along the red of Adam’s clay; 

The mist was error and damnation, 
The lane the road unto salvation. 

Out of the mist into the light, 

O blesséd gift of inner sight. 


This is what we need to give us a new heaven and 
anew earth. We need the blessed gift of the inner 


132. THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


sight. We need the glory of the lighted mind for 
to him that is in Christ Jesus old things have passed 
away, and behold, ail things have become new. 

The second thing that followed upon Saul Kane’s 
conversion was that he immediately went to work. 
Sin had made him an idler. Christ changed him 
into a worker. Sin had made him a social liability; 
Christ made him over into a social asset. The 
greatest socializing power in the world is the re- 
deeming, regenerating gospel of the grace of God. 
Sin had made him a parasite. Christ made him a 
ploughman and out on the farm he found his task. 
It was a humble task but it was a task. From the 
hands of old farmer Callow he took the reins and 
in the field of honest toil he put his new faith to 
the test: 


I kneeled there in the muddy fallow, 

I knew that Christ was there with Callow, 
That Christ was standing there with me, 
That Christ had taught me what to be, 
Lhat I should plough, and as I ploughed 
My Saviour Christ would sing aloud, 
And as I drove the clods apart 

Christ would be ploughing in my heart, 
Through rest-harrow and bitter roots, 
Through all my bad life’s rotten fruits. 


Out there in the fields with God the thought of 
Christ’s everlasting mercy sang in his soul, the 
Christ who holds the open gate, and as the seasons 


THE EVERLASTING MERCY 133 


came and went love and light and laughter filled 
the soul of this once beaten and broken man, and 
purity and peace became his constant song. 

The problem of religion is not to find mercy but 
to find penitence, and you will find a penitent heart 
when you think of all you might have been, of all 
you might have done, of your broken promises, 
and above all when you stand before Christ’s Cross, 
where sorrow cried out in love for you. Do not 
argue about it. Accept it and come to the ever- 
lasting mercy. 


XII 
THE MAN WITH THE HOE 


EpWIN MARKHAM 


HATEVER else of truth and revelation 
\ \ is yet to break forth from the immortal, 
inexhaustible, and imperishable first 
chapter of Genesis, one great truth at least shines 
out from the page like a lustrous jewel. Un- 
dimmed by the centuries with all their progress in 
science and philosophy the truth that God and man 
are bound as by a family tie shines on. This is 
the revelation expressed and proclaimed in the in- 
spiring, revolutionary statement of the words, ‘God 
created man in his own image.’ Made out of the 
dust of the earth man is a child of God. Child of 
the earth, he is created in the image of God. What 
does that mean? What is the image of God? 
Medieval theologians used to argue that the name 
of God was written on the face of men. In a 
fanciful way, by the formation of eyes and nose 
and ears, they came to the conclusion that the 
words komo dei could be discovered on the face 
of every man. That is only fancy, for the image 
of God belongs not to bodily appearances, but to 
the spirit. 
134 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 135 


If you will turn with me to a little book of less 
than fifty pages, entitled The Westminster Shorter 
Catechism, you will find the answer. Catechisms, 
I know, are somewhat out of date in these days of 
the newer pedagogy, but, nevertheless, there are 
some things of the old order that abide. In answer 
to the question, ‘ How did God create man?’ this 
little theological document gives this answer, ‘ God 
created man male and female after His own image 
in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with do- 
minion over the creatures.’ Here in a sentence we 
have the marks of a man. The image of God in 
man is revealed in man’s possession of knowledge. 
Man is like God in being intelligent. Righteous- 
ness is another attribute of the image of God. Man 
is like God in being moral and in possession of a 
conscience. Holiness belongs also to the image of 
God. Man is like God in being in love with the 
white light of purity. Dominion belongs also to 
that image. Man is like God in being a master 
and not a slave, in using the world for higher ends 
and not in being used by it. What a high and 
noble ideal it is, an ideal that kept the people of 
the Bible from being slaves themselves and from 
permitting them to own slaves in perpetuity. 

Now this is a supreme, moral principle that is 
timeless and immutable. Man is an end in him- 
self, and not a means to anything else. He stands 
in the midst of the universe, holding dominion over 


136 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


the forces of life. He is supreme in the sphere of 
material things. All things are to be under him. 
Anything that degrades or destroys or hurts him 
is wrong. ‘The one thing that outweighs all other 
values is the soul of man. Let a single life be at 
stake and wireless signals flash, ships change their 
course; whole communities organize; traffic stops. 
In his book, Ze Reconstruction of Religion, Pro- 
fessor Ellwood says: ‘ The central teaching of all 
social religions and of the religion of Jesus in par- 
ticular is the supreme worth of men no matter what 
their race, class or condition may be.’ This is the 
message of Edwin Markham’s poem, The Man 
With the Hoe. There are many who remember 
what a sensation these verses made when first pub- 
lished. He had been fascinated by the painting, 
The Man With the Hoe, by Millet. The great 
French painter had often used his brush to preach 
a sermon as a protest against social misery. 
Throwing aside all mythological subjects, he 
painted the things he saw and knew. He, himself, 
had known the misery of dire poverty and his can- 
vases, such as The Reapers, The Gleaners, The 
Woodcutter and The Shepherd, reveal how well he 
knew the common people. He painted the picture 
of The Angelus with its stirring spiritual message, 
of workers in the field bowing in reverence as the 
call to prayer came to them out of the air; but in 
The Man With the Hoe, he had proclaimed the 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 137 


condition of the common toilers of the soil, and 
had pictured a man leaning on his hoe, broken in 
spirit, bent in body, the light of his soul having 
died out. 


Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 

The emptiness of ages in Is face, 

And on his back the burden of the world. 

Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? 


Gazing upon this picture the soul of the poet took 
fire and he said: 


Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 

To have dominion over sea and land; 

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 

To feel the passion of Eternity? 

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns 

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? 

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf 

There is no shape more terrible than this— 

More tongued with censure of the world’s blind 
greed— 

More filled with signs and portents for the soul— 

More fraught with menace to the universe. 


This is a challenge which society and the Christian 
Church must face. For here is a man born in the 


138 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


image of God, born for knowledge, for righteous- 
ness, for holiness, for lordly dominion, who had 
become a slave, a servile thing of the dust. There 
is here not only cause for tears but for terror. A 
whole French Revolution and the horror of Russian 
bolshevism are all here: 


O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 

How will the Future reckon with this Man? 
How answer his brute question im that hour 
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world! 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is— 
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, 
After the silence of the centuries? 


The painting of Millet and the poetry of Mark- 
ham combine to make great preaching. ‘The pic- 
ture they present challenges the social order that 
permits such a thing to exist. It challenges our 
conscience and proclaims the principle of all social 
reconstruction that we are our brother’s keeper. A 
society that permits a man to be used as a thing, 
a chattel, a slave, is not a society at all. It isa 
machine, and a machine that weaves into its prod- 
uct the warp and woof of human life should be 
scrapped. We are flooded to-day with new social 
and economic theories and are lost in the maze of 
attempted social reconstruction. Few of us, per- 
haps, have the time or ability to analyze these so- 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 139 


cial and economic theories, but there are certain 
Christian simplicities that are easy for us to un- 
derstand and great and sacred enough upon which 
to build the new civilization of to-morrow. That 
civilization must be built upon the principle that 
human personality is the one priceless thing in the 
world, that it is not a means to any end, and that 
little children, helpless womanhood and dependent 
manhood may not be exploited for the comfort or 
profit of any man or any body of men in the world. 
The closing words of Lord Charnwood’s Life of 
Lincoln consist of a quotation from the great 
American which was the sacred motive of all his 
strong, wise, and unselfish life. ‘As I would not be 
a Slave so I would not bea master. This expresses 
my idea of democracy.’ The words of Jesus are 
clear and unmistakable. ‘ Whoso shall offend one 
of these little ones which believe in me, it were 
better for him that a millstone were hanged about 
his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth 
of the sea.’ ‘ For what shall it profit a man, if he 
gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or 
what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ 
The New Testament repeats the claim: ‘ Know ye 
not that ye are the temple of God, and that the 
Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile 
the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the 
temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’ 
Frank Mason North’s great lines emphasize it: 


140 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


In haunts of wretchedness and need, 
On shadowed thresholds dark with fears, 
From paths where hide the lures of greed, 
We catch the vision of Thy tears. 


From tender childhood’s helplessness, 
From woman’s grief, man’s burdened toil, 
From famished souls, from sorrow’s stress, 
Thy heart has never known recoil. 


The triumph of every social reform that history 
knows anything about has come through the proc- 
lamation of this truth. Every advance towards 
liberty has been brought about by a realization of 
the absolute worth of human personality. In the 
light of the truth that man is made in the image 
of God, the slum and the sweatshop become not 
merely disgraces and blots upon our social system, 
but crimes against man and against Almighty God. 
All forms of man’s inhumanity to man go down be- 
fore the preaching of this eternal truth. In the 
very first chapter of the Bible man finds the char- 
ter of his liberty. Domestic slavery, holding its 
own for centuries, at last disappeared and was de- 
stroyed before the light that shone from the face 
of even a slave made in the image of God, and 
industrial slavery of all kinds, here or in China, in 
Europe or in Africa, the exploitation of little chil- 
dren in the workshops of the world, all forms of 
trade that degrade and harm the spirit and soul of 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 141 


mankind, all commerce in drink and drugs, all 
governments that are built on the theory that men 
are food for powder, are condemned and outlawed 
in the presence of this divine proclamation. 

There is a recent picture by the Scottish artist 
Gibbs, entitled Te Dream of Christmas. It isa 
picture of a European city with its towers and 
spires rising in the moonlight, and through one of 
the narrow streets Christ passes with His shep- 
herd’s staff in hand and a little, ragged, homeless 
child in His left arm. It is only personality that 
is priceless. This is why the religion of Jesus must 
always be revolutionary. It must be revolution- 
ary until the whole world comes to understand that 
all men are brothers, that human life is the one 
priceless thing in the world and that all government 
and legislation, all industry and all science must 
become the servants of humanity to the end that 
all men may come to the stature of perfect men in 
Christ Jesus. Jesus proclaimed the infinite value 
of every man by His death on the Cross, and no 
man dare make a tool or a slave out of a ‘ brother 
for whom Christ died.’ 

Doubtless Edwin Markham was right in his in- 
terpretation of Millet’s painting. There may be, 
however, in the painting an additional thought. 
Man is not only responsible for his brother. He 
is responsible for himself. Born in the image of 
God, he is born to have dominion not only over the 


142 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


things about him but over himself. The one un- 
conquerable thing in the world is a man’s own 
soul. It will not do to say that circumstances are 
his master. Circumstances are only plastic clay 
in the hands of character. It will not do for John 
Vance Cheney to answer Edwin Markham by say- 
ing: 


Need was, need is, and need will ever be 
For him and such as he. 


There is something brutal about such a view. Man 
is born to have dominion and within his own pos- 
session is his indomitable will. Lincoln was right 
when he said that he would not own a slave, neither 
would he be a slave. There is much in that. 
There is something in the iron, grim determination 
of the Scottish character as it is voiced by Robert 
Burns: 


Wha will be a traitor knave? 

Wha can fill a coward’s grave? 

Wha sae base as be a slave? 
Let him turn and flee! 


It is always possible for a man to contend with cir- 
cumstances and to rise above his environment. It 
is given to him to master the conditions under 
which he has to live, and keep his soul free. There 
is a fine passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Uncle 
Tom, driven to the wall, with the whip waiting for 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 143 


his naked body, and brutality ready to crush him, 
answers his cruel and brutal master who says to 
him, ‘ How would you like to be tied to a tree and 
have a slow fire lit up round you?’ ‘ Mas’r,’ said 
Tom, ‘ I know you can do dreadful things, but after 
you've killed the body there ain’t any more ye can 
do. And, oh, there’s all eternity to come after 
that.’ 

That has been the glory of martyrdom in all 
history, that men have chosen to die rather than 
be slaves of sin or tyranny. God means a man to 
look up, not down, to look out, and not merely in, 
to see the stars as well as to see the soil, and how- 
ever much we may admire Edwin Markham’s The 
Man With the Hoe, there is something equally 
great if not greater and more familiar in that pas- 
sage in John Bunyan which Theodore Roosevelt 
gloried in and from which he often preached. Let 
me renew your acquaintance with Bunyan. The 
scene is laid in the Interpreter’s house and Chris- 
tiana and her family have come thither. The In- 
terpreter showed them ‘into a room where was a 
man that could look no way but downwards, with 
a muck-rake in his hand: there stood one also over 
his head with a celestial crown in his hand, and 
proffered him that crown for his muck-rake: but 
the man did neither look up nor regard, but rake 
to himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust of 
the floor. Then said Christiana, I persuade my- 


144 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


self that I know somewhat of the meaning of this; 
for this is the figure of a man of this world; is it 
not, good sir? Thou hast said right, said he; and 
his muck-rake doth show his carnal mind. And, 
whereas thou seest him rather give heed to take 
up straws and sticks, and the dust of the floor, than 
to what He says that calls to him from above, with 
the celestial crown in His hand; it is to show, that 
heaven is but as a fable to some, and that things 
here are counted the only things substantial. Now, 
whereas it was also showed thee that this man could 
look no way but downwards, it is to let thee know 
that earthly things, when they are with power upon 
men’s minds, quite carry their hearts away from 
God.’ 

We are told on all hands that the sense of sin 
is dying out in the world. I believe it is true. I 
believe with Sir Oliver Lodge that men are not 
troubled about their sins as they were in the days 
of old, and I think I know why. It is because the 
sense of man’s divine and immortal destiny has 
become dim and faint. It is only in the presence 
of perfection that imperfection is revealed. It is 
only in the presence of purity that impurity be- 
comes intolerable. It is only in the presence of 
God that man becomes conscious of his need. ‘If 
I had not come,’ said Jesus, ‘ye would not have 
known sin.’ If man is only the product of the 
forces of life, if he is only the last product of the 


THE MAN WITH THE HOE 145 


evolution of the slime of earth, then of course he 
will not be too much disturbed when he sinks back 
into that slime, but if he is a child of God and heir 
of immortality, born in the image of God, then he 
will be conscious of the pit into which he has fallen. 
It is the thought of man’s glorious destiny that 
keeps the stars in his sky. 

‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy 
fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast 
ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of 
him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? 
For thou hast made him a little lower than the 
angels, and hast crowned him with glory and hon- 
our. ‘Thou madest him to have dominion over the 
works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under 
his feet.’ The New Testament faces the issue 
squarely and asserts that is not a true picture of 
man, for all things are not yet under him, but there 
is hope, for we see one man, even Jesus, and He is 
crowned with glory and honour. We see Him and 
in His presence we discover how God’s image has 
been defaced in us, and how far short we have 
come of attaining to that high calling to which 
we have been called. In one of his stories George 
Macdonald tells of a country preacher who found 
on his doorstep a woman of the street, helpless and 
homeless. Like a Christian man he took her into 
his home, comforted her, and led her back to the 
paths of purity and peace. During that interview 


146 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


the little daughter asked her mother, ‘ Who is in 
the parlour with father? ’ and the wise mother re- 
plied, ‘It is an angel, dear, who has lost her way, 
and your father is showing her the way back.’ 

The world is full of those who have lost their 
way. They have lost their way in a mist of phil- 
osophical speculation, in the materialism and 
worldliness of every-day life, in the rush and roar 
of our complex civilization, in the dark by-paths 
of unmoral and immoral living. Man is not a 
machine. He is not the last accidental result of 
atomic forces. He is a living soul. He is a child 
of God. In him is the passion for immortality, 
and the Lord Jesus Christ is his Master, his Re- 
deemer and his Lord. 


“XIII 
COLUMBUS 


JOAQUIN MILLER 


WENTY-FIVE years after the Apostle 

Paul had turned his face towards the Gos- 

pel light he stood on trial for his faith 

before a Roman tribunal. Twenty-five years is a 

long stretch in the life of a man whose years were 

limited to three-score and five, for if Paul were 

thirty-six when he became a Christian he was, at 

the time of his trial, sixty-one years of age. He 

was looking back over a quarter of a century which 

had been filled with sacrifice and service, with 
bonds and imprisonments. 

Twenty-five years can do a great deal to our 
visions. Their beginning may be in the bright 
light of a glowing noonday but their glory may 
fade into the light of common day. Twenty-five 
years can steal away our enthusiasm, and in the 
face of the dull, drab drudgery whick follows, our 
dreams can fade and vanish over the horizon. 

The Apostle, however, confessed that after 
twenty-five years his vision still led him on and 


motived his life. His Christian experience began 
147 


148 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


in the blinding light of a miraculous revelation. 
Whether in the body or out of it he could never 
tell. All he knew was, that journeying from Jeru- 
salem with credentials from the High Priest to im- 
prison and to kill, suddenly he had met Christ on 
the high road near the ancient city of Damascus. 
His heart had been hot with hate and his face had 
been set towards the persecution of those who held 
the Christian faith. Suddenly the sky fell, a voice 
called his name, and Christ stood by his side sum- 
moning him to service. 

That vision changed his life. From that day he 
became a different man. He was no visionary, no 
dreamer, no impressionist. He was a particularly 
hard-headed, keenly intellectual and _practical- 
minded man, and there is little chance that he could 
have been deceived by an illusion. He was the last 
man in the world to follow an illusion for a quarter 
of a century. Yet held up by a vision, he had 
been true to it through a long and bitter struggle. 
He had anchored his life to the invisible and was 
ready to follow his Lord to the last limit of the 
world. 


Dreamer of dreams? We take the taunt with 
gladness 

Knowing that God beyond the years you see 

Has wrought the dreams that count with you for 
madness 

Into the texture of the world to be. 


COLUMBUS 149 


This, then, is my theme. Victory comes because 
of vision, and where there is no vision the people 
cast off restraint. Long ago it was said of one 
who became a prince and a power in the world, 
‘Behold, this dreamer cometh’; and this dreamer 
of dreams who had left his dull, gray life behind 
him, pushed on into the new day of a brighter to- 
morrow. God leads His people by dreams and | 
visions. If the vision that you think you see beck- 
ons you to something you are sure you can do, then 
it is not a vision. If it beckons you to do something 
you feel you cannot do, then follow it—to the very 
margin of the world. The true vision lures us on 
to what the world regards as impossible. 

George Stephenson, the inventor of the steam 
engine, was a dreamer of dreams, but people 
thought he was just crazy. He dreamed a dream 
of a steam engine that could pull heavy loads and 
travel twice as fast as a racehorse, and a dignified 
member of the British House of Commons said: 
‘What can be more absurd and ridiculous than the 
prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as 
fast as horses? We should as soon expect the peo- 
ple of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off 
upon one of Congreve’s rockets as to trust them- 
selves to the mercy of such a machine, going at 
such a rate. We trust that Parliament will, in all 
the railways it may grant, limit the speed to eight 
or nine miles an hour, which is as great as can be 


150 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


ventured on.’ But for fifteen years Stephenson 
struggled on and at last his dream came true. 

Joaquin Miller has pictured Columbus as a 
dreamer defying all the facts of life and sailing out 
into the ocean’s trackless mystery. 


Behind him lay the gray Azores, 
Behind the Gates of Hercules; 

Before him not the ghost of shores, 
Before him only shoreless seas. 

The good mate said: *‘ Now must we pray, 
For lo! the very stars are gone. 

Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?’ 
‘Why, say “ Sail on! sail on! and on!””’ 


‘My men grow mutinous day by day; 

My men grow ghastly, wan and weak ’— 

The stout mate thought of home; a spray 

Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. 
‘What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, 

If we sight naught but seas at dawn?’ 
‘Why, you shall say at break of day, 

“ Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!”’ 


Sailing on through mist and murk the dream of 
Columbus came true. The dream and the vision 
belong to the fabric of faith, and faith is the vic- 
tory that overcomes the world. A_ well-known 
scientist recently commenting upon the great roll of 
heroes celebrated in the eleventh chapter of He- 
brews, continues that high record of faith as fol- 
lows: 


COLUMBUS 151 


‘By faith Columbus set out in an open boat, to 
go around the unknown world. 

‘By faith the Pilgrim fathers left their homes, 
and landed on the stern and rockbound coast of 
New England. They sought liberty to worship 
God and became our spiritual forefathers. 

‘By faith Washington took up arms against an 
empire whose morning drum-beats encircled the 
world. 

‘ By faith Jefferson bought the land wherein mil- 
lions now live, although people laughed at him for 
acquiring useless and inaccessible territory. 

‘By faith our fathers crossed the prairies as, of 
old, their fathers crossed the sea, to make the West 
as the East, the homestead of the free. 

‘ By faith a band of American missionaries went 
to the cannibal islands and gave us Hawaii. 

~¢ And what shall I say of those who, by faith, re- 
moved mountains and bridged rivers; who brought 
waters to a thirsty land and made the desert rejoice 
and blossom as the rose; who gave sight to the 
blind, cleansed the lepers, and caused the lame to 
walk; who went over the sea to share the peril of 
oppressed peoples; who suffered torment and death 
from fire and smoke; who took food to the starving 
in strange lands; who went down to the sea in 
ships, and up into the air like eagles? ’ 

It was a vision of Jesus Christ, calling him from 
his long and deep-seated prejudice, which chal- 


152. THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


lenged Saul of Tarsus and which, at last, through 
him, changed the current of history. 

Twenty-five years after he had seen Christ Paul 
stood before Agrippa the king, and confessed that 
he had not been ‘disobedient to the heavenly 
vision.’ Through darkness and light, through hope 
and faith, through success and failure, through long 
marches and shipwreck, through peril of robbers, 
through hunger and thirst, he had carried on, fol- 
lowing the vision which had first captivated his 
spirit. It is not easy to keep on following the 
gleam when the sun goes down and the stars fade 
out. We may succeed, perhaps, in hitching our 
wagon to a star, but it is a more difficult matter to 
follow the star across the desert over the long, 
lonely, trackless level that runs out to the horizon. 
But the dream that does not issue in action is a 
delusion. Unless we can face the drudgery of the 
long day’s task, we had better not set out on the 
quest. It takes time and patience to make the 
dream come true. 

The other day a scientist, working quietly in his 
laboratory, discovered one of the missing elements 
belonging to the fundamental substratum of the 
universe. He had followed the dream for years 
and had seen the vision, and through all those 
quiet, silent, obscure days he had searched quietly 
among the evasive forces of life until the long, 
oftentimes unavailing search, ended in victory. 


COLUMBUS 153 


The dream and the duty are eternally wedded. 
Columbus pressed on and on after the vision that 
held his heart, and would not let him go. 


They sailed and sailed, as winds nught blow, 
Until at last the blanched mate said: 
‘Why, now not even God would know 
Should I and all my men fall dead. 
These very winds forget thew way, 
For God from these dread seas is gone. 
Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say ’— 
He said: ‘Sail on! sail on! and on!’ 


They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the 
mate: 
‘This mad sea shows his teeth to-night. 
He curls his lif, he lies in wait, 
With lifted teeth, as if to bite! 
Brave Admiral, say but one good word: 
What shall we do when hope is gone?’ 
The words leapt like a leaping sword: 
‘Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!’ 


The way is long and at times dangerous, but if 
the vision be real and the dream God-given it issues 
at last in a fine fulfillment. First the dream, then 
the long, long discipline. Theodore Thomas, who 
did so much for American music, had an uphill 
struggle after he had seen the vision which mas- 
tered him in his youth. Thinking of the long road 
which he was taking and the sacrifice he was endur- 
ing, he said: ‘I have gone without food longer than 


154 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


I should, I have walked when I could not afford to 
tide, I have even played when my hands were cold. 
But I shall succeed, for I shall never give up my 
belief that at last the people will come to me, and 
my concerts will be crowded. I have undying 
faith in the latent musical appreciation of the 
American public. He kept on until his dream 
came true. 

How true this is of the Christian life! What a 
vision we have when first we meet with Christ in 
the way! How beautiful life is! 


Heaven above is softer blue, 
Earth beneath is sweeter green. 


How sweet the music! What a time of blossom- 
ing spring it is! Then follows the long stretch 
across the open, the hard climb up the hill and 
down the valley until at last we come to victory. 
After Christian had enjoyed a night in the House 
Beautiful, resting in the chamber looking out to- 
wards the east, Bunyan’s Pilgrim went down into 
the Valley of Humiliation to fight his way through 
to peace and power. 


Let no man think that sudden in a minute 
All is accomplished and the work is done ;— 
Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst 
begin it 
Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 


COLUMBUS 155 


This, too, is true of the Christian Church. First 
a vision of the coming of the Kingdom of God on 
earth, then the long years and centuries of sacrifice 
and service. ‘The dream has always been hovering 
on the margin of the Church’s consciousness. 
Long, long centuries ago that dream and vision 
came to the people of God. ‘ And it shall come to 
pass in the last days that the mountain of the 
Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the 
mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; 
and all nations shall flow unto it. And many peo- 
ple shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to 
the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God 
of Jacob; and he will teach us his ways, and we will 
walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the 
law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 
And he shall judge among the nations and shall re- 
buke many people; and they shall beat their swords 
into plowshares, and their spears into pruning- 
hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against na- 
tion, neither shall they learn war any more.’ That 
vision still lures us on. Sometimes it eludes us but 
it ever leads through disappointed hopes and de- 
feated purposes to victory. It is a dream, but it is 
more than a dream. It is a vision of a warless 
world, of a Christ-controlled world. The Christian 
Church presses forward like Columbus, who sailed 
on and on, until that which was without form and 
void, took form and became a reality. 


156 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


Then pale and worn, he kept his deck, 
And peered through darkness. Ah, that 
night 
Of all dark nights!’ And then a speck— 
A light! a light! a light! a light! 
It grew, a starhit flag unfurled! 
It grew to-be Time’s burst of dawn. 
He gained a world; he gave that world 
Its grandest lesson: ‘On! sail on!’ 


The Christian Church has always been a 
dreamer of dreams. It has always been following 
what the world calls illusions, but it has found its 
success along the line of adventure, for faith is 
life’s greatest adventure. Speaking of the progress 
of the British Empire, General Gordon once said, 
‘England owes more to her adventurers than to 
her statesmen.’ Whatever judgment we may pass 
on that statement certainly it is true that the 
Church owes much to her adventurers, to the men 
and women who loved not their life, but gave them- 
selves as hostages for the faith which meant every- 
thing to them. All along the way there has been 
risk and hazard and adventure, and the days of 
adventure are not yet over. The vision still lures 
us on. The lands beyond still call and say ‘ Come 
over and help us.’ In one of the daily papers of 
India there appeared this Hindu prayer: 


Weary are we of empty creeds 
Of deafening calls to fruitless deeds: 


COLUMBUS 154 


Weary of priests who cannot pray, 

Of guides who show no man the way; 
Weary of rites wise men condemn, 

Of worship linked with lust and shame; 
Weary of Custom, blind, enthroned, 
Of conscience trampled, God disowned; 
Weary of men in sections cleft, 
Hindu life of love bereft; 

Woman debased, no more a queen, 
Now knowing what she once hath been; 
Weary of babbling about birth 

And of mockery men cali mirth; 
Weary of life not understood, 

A battle, not a brotherhood ; 

Weary of Kali Yuga years, 

Freighted with chaos, darkness, fears ; 
Life is an ill, the sea of births is wide, 
And we are weary; who shall be our guide? 


Dare we grow weary before we have introduced 
this lost and seeking world to our Guide? Dare 
we faint and falter before He is made known to 
the world for which He died? Shall we be dis- 
obedient to the heavenly vision and falter before 
our dream of a world wholly surrendered to Christ 
comes true? After the years are gone, will it be 
left for us to say, ‘ We saw the vision but it faded 
out with the setting sun and vanished over the 
margin of the world!’ That, indeed, would be a 
tragedy. 


XIV 
THE IMPERCIPIENT 


THomMAS HARDY 


P AHERE are people who are colour blind. 
They do not see what others see. Their 
senses do not respond to the truth and 

reality of the world about them. They have eyes 

but they see not. There are people who are tone 
deaf. To them music is a succession of noises. 

They have ears but they hear not, and an oratorio 

is often, as it was for Gladstone, an excruciating 

experience. There are people who have little or no 
sense of taste, or possess what we call a depraved 
taste. There are others who have no social incli- 
nations and seek solitude and shun companionship. 

The question naturally arises, ‘Are there those who 

lack the religious sense, who are colour blind to 

the beauties of religion and deaf to the voices of 
the Spirit? ’ 

Thomas Hardy, the English novelist and poet, 
pictures such an one and perhaps it is of himself 
he is speaking. His verses are entitled The Im- 
percipient, that is, one who does not perceive spir- 
itual and religious reality. He represents himself 


as having been present at a cathedral service, hear- 
158 


THE IMPERCIPIENT 159 


ing the music and observing the hushed and rever- 
ent attitude of the worshippers. He himself, how- 
ever, has had no part in the service. The music 
and the ritual, the praise and the prayers, have 
all meant nothing to him. He had been an ob- 
server, an onlooker, and beyond the pale of faith. 
He found no answering response in his nature to 
what others found to be a quickening influence. 
Faith to him was only a fantasy, and religious hope 
a mirage. So turning away from the cathedral and 
its impressive service he gave voice to his dis- 
appointment, 


That with this bright believing band 
I have no claim to be, 

That faiths by which my comrades stand, 
Seem fantasies to me, 

And mirage-mists their Shining Land 
Is a strange destiny. 


It is not that this unresponsive, unperceiving 
worshipper is cynical. He is only colour blind. 
He does not see. He does not understand. He 
does not deny reality to those who do see and hear 
and understand; but as for him, his eyes are closed 
and he finds nothing corresponding to what others 
find. Religion has been a reality to men of all 
tribes and tempers, yet it finds no response in him. 
Why is it? Why does he not see? Why does he 
not understand? Why is he ‘ the impercipient ’? 


160 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


We can travel the world over and find temples 
where men pray in every land. Man is known as 
a religious animal. Is it possible there may be 
one in whom religion awakens no response? 


Why that my soul should be consigned 
To Infelicity, 
Why always I must feel as blind 
To sights my brethren see, 
Why joys they have found I cannot find, 
Abides a mystery. 


Such a confession should lead, he says, not to cen- 
sure but should awake an answering response of 
charity. God speaks to other men. Why does He 
not speak to him? Is he to blame that he is not 
religious? Like Job he seems to cry out: ‘Oh, 
that I knew where I might find him! that I might 
come even to his seat! . . . Behold, I go for- 
ward, but he is not there; and backward, but I 
cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he 
doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth 
himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.’ 


Since heart of mine knows not that ease 
Which they know; since it be 

That He who breathes All’s-Well to these 
Breathes no All’s-Well to me, 

My lack might move their sympathes 
And Christian charity. 


THE IMPERCIPIENT 161 


I am lke a gazer who should mark 
An inland company 

Standing up fingered with, ‘Hark! hark! 
The glorious distant sea!’ 

And feel, “Alas, ’tis but yon dark 
And wind-swept pine to me!’ 


Although he does not see, he is sensible of the 
fact that others see. He is not indifferent; he is 
dissatisfied. His heart is not at rest. He is neither 
an atheist nor an agnostic, but a seeker after God, 
and if he had a vote he would vote to make religion 
true. He is like one who is seeking rest and finds 
none. 

It is an interesting self-examination, reverent and 
yet very honest, and religion above everything else 
should be honest. Because of his honesty Job who 
himself was “‘ impercipient ” came at last to under- 
stand. 


Yet I would bear my shortcomings 
With meet tranquillity, 

But for the charge that blessed things, 
I'd liefer not have be. 

O, doth a bird deprived of wings 
Go earth-bound willfully! 

Enough! As yet disquiet chngs 
About us. Rest shall we. 


What can be said to such an one? Perhaps there 
are others like him who find what warms the hearts 
of their comrades leaves them cold. They are col- 


162 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


our blind to the beauty of spiritual reality. They 
are deaf to the heavenly harmonies. They are un- 
responsive to the glories of the unseen. What can 
we say concerning such, and are there people who 
can be excused as having within them no religious 
affections and ne spiritual response? 

If we will follow the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment the first answer to be made to the question 
raised is, that Hardy does not present an excep- 
tional, but an average and natural experience. It 
is an experience that is reflected on every page of 
the New Testament. Christianity teaches that the 
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit 
of God for they are spiritually discerned. The 
wisdom of God is a mystery and is not discovered 
by the philosophers of our universities and colleges. 
The unspiritual man rejects the truths of the Spirit 
of God; to him they are sheer folly for he cannot 
understand them and the reason is that they must 
be read with the spiritual eye. 

There is in the life of Jesus a very remarkable 
and interesting record of an experience which il- 
lustrates the colour-blindness and the tone-deaf- 
ness in our ordinary humanity. In the crisis of 
His career a deputation came out of the Gentile 
world saying to one of His followers: ‘Sir, we 
would see Jesus.’ It was a prophecy of the time 
when the nations would turn to the Gospel for 
light and leading, and in the emotional ecstasy of 


THE IMPERCIPIENT 163 


that hour Christ’s claim was verified by a voice 
from heaven. The multitude that stood by heard 
the voice but said it thundered. Others, hearing 
but not understanding, said ‘ an angel hath spoken 
to him,’ but Jesus said ‘ this voice hath not come 
for my sake but for your sakes.’ To some the 
voice of God was only thunder upon the horizon. 
To others, it was only unmeaning and mystical 
voices speaking out of the silence, but to Him who 
had ears to hear and a heart to understand it was 
the voice of God that spoke. Spiritual things are 
spiritually discerned. 

It requires a magnet to detect the presence of 
metal. We may say, for example, that iron is 
magnetically discerned. It requires imagination 
to appreciate poetry. We may say poetry, to be 
discerned, must have a poetically discerning mind. 
It is true in every apartment of the mind. Jenny 
Lind writes of the day and the hour when she be- 
came ‘artistically alive.’ The appreciation of 
music was suddenly born within her. To appreci- 
ate beauty one must have his eyes open to the 
things that are lovely. Blind eyes cannot see 
beauty, neither can blind eyes see God. Spiritual 
things are spiritually discerned. 


The Spring blew trumpets of colour; 

Her green sang in my brain— 

I heard a blind man groping 
‘Tap—tap’ with his cane; 


164 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


I pitied him in his blindness ; 
But can I boast, ‘I see’? 
Perhaps there walks a spirit 
Close by, who pities me,— 


A spirit who hears me tapping 
The five-sensed cane of mind 
Amid such unguessed glories— 
That I am worse than blind. 


Enlarging this theme, we conclude that the re- 
ligious sense may be cultivated. One may travel 
the world over and find evidences of religious faith 
and spiritual experience in every land and in every 
age. Beneath the agnosticism of the poet’s verse 
there breathes religious aspiration and the discon- 
tent of the spirit that craves satisfaction and rest. 
The very unrest of life calls for the satisfaction 
which religion can give, for underneath all the mov- 
ings of our personality there is the life of the Spirit 
that calls for spiritual fellowship. ‘The heart is 
hungry and the spirit is thirsty for that which the 
world cannot give. The quest after God is the 
surest evidence that He Himself has inspired the 
search. Luther Burbank, who did so much in the 
realm of beauty and usefulness, tells us that he 
worked no miracle in nature but merely having 
faith in the forces of life, and relying upon the 
processes of nature, by patience that never failed, 
he brought forth the creations that cause men to 
admire and wonder. 


THE IMPERCIPIENT 165 


Do we act in the realm of the spirit as Burbank 
acted in the realm of nature? Do we take for 
granted the processes of the divine lifer By pa- 
tience and unrelenting experiment we may put our- 
selves in the way of the life of the Spirit and move 
out into the atmosphere where we can breathe the 
larger life of the spiritual world. How can men 
have spiritual experiences in the tainted atmos- 
phere of worldliness? Above the timber line, be- 
yond the frontier of the forest, upon the heights of 
the mountain where the snows fall in eternal white- 
ness, a little tree, twisted and stunted, was found 
having twenty-eight rings to represent twenty- 
eight years of bitter struggle against the thin at- 
mosphere of the heights where it had its dwelling 
place. Down on the slopes that same stunted and 
dwarfed thing would have grown into a mighty 
giant, tossing its plumes in the glory of an exu- 
berant growth. Many a man whose spiritual life 
is dwarfed in an attitude of cynicism and critical 
intellectualism would flower into the loveliness of 
a religious faith if he but gave himself the ad- 
vantage of living in a sympathetic religious at- 
mosphere. 

One thing more needs to be said: The re- 
ligious sense which belongs to every little child may 
be lost through neglect. The most wonderful thing 
about humanity is the yearning and craving of the 
spirit after the ideal. There are thousands of men 


166 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


who, if they spoke the truth, would tell us that 
they have succeeded in silencing voices that once 
spoke to them. The Spirit of God does not always 
strive with men. Through lack of use the powers 
with which God has endowed us may fall away. 
The classic example of this truth is the life of 
Charles Darwin, the eminent scientist. It is a 
judgment which he, himself, passed upon his own 
lite. ‘ Up to the age of thirty,’ he says, ‘ or beyond 
it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of 
Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a 
schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, 
especially in the historical plays. . . . Pic- 
tures gave me considerable, and music very great 
delight. But now for many years I cannot endure 
to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to 
read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull 
that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my 
taste for pictures or music. . . . I retain some 
taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the 
exquisite delight which it formerly did. 
There is a law of atrophy in the spiritual world. 
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine 
for grinding general laws out of large collections 
of facts. . . . If I had to live my life again, 
T would have made a rule to read some poetry and 
listen to some music at least once every week; for 
perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would 


THE IMPERCIPIENT 167 


thus have been kept active through use. The loss 
of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may pos- 
sibly be injurious to the intellect and more prob- 
ably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emo- 
tional part of our nature.’ 

What happened to Darwin in the matter of his 
xsthetic sense happens also with regard to the spir- 
itual nature of man. We decline to speculate on 
what the ultimate end of such an experience will 
be. We do not pretend to know the limits of God’s 
magnanimous goodness, but we certainly see 
working out before our very eyes the laws of life. 
It is not possible for a man to escape if he neglects 
either his body or his spirit. Before he knows it 
he has passed the dead line. He becomes colour 
blind to the beauty of holiness and deaf to the 
voices of the angels, and the tragedy dramatized 
in the Book of Proverbs is reénacted. ‘I have 
called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my 
hand, and no man regarded; Ye have set at nought 
all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I 
also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when 
your fear cometh; When your fear cometh as deso- 
lation, and your destruction cometh as a whirl- 
wind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. 
Then shall they call upon me, but I will not an- 
swer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not 
find me,’ 


XV 
THE LORD GOD PLANTED A GARDEN 


DoroTHY FRANCES GURNEY 


P “AHE Bible story begins and ends in a gar- 
den. A garden is a place of rest, a place 
of beauty, a place of loveliness. It is in 

a garden God walks in the cool of the day, for 

beauty is His dwelling place. ‘ His dwelling is in 

the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and 
the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of 
man.’ Wherever God is, there is beauty. That 
truth is reflected again and again in the Old Testa- 
ment. It was out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, 
that God shined. Perhaps we have not made 
enough of beauty in our religious thinking. We 
have inherited from our Puritan ancestry a taste 
for substantial realities, and we have neglected too 
much the things that are lovely and of good report, 
forgetting that strength and beauty are eternally 
wedded and that loveliness is the garment of the 

Eternal. 

Nature itself is God’s glorious apparel and serves 
as a partial revelation of His character. We read 
that John Calvin lived his life among the glories 
of the Swiss Alps but never saw them. We read 

168 


THE LORD PLANTED A GARDEN 169 


that Tauler, the mystic, covered his eyes with his 
cap lest his spiritual meditations should be dis- 
turbed by the violets. Beauty and loveliness are 
everywhere apparent and God reveals His presence 
against the background of nature’s majestic glories. 
It was on the mountain in the quiet of the night 
that our Lord was transfigured and revealed Him- 
self in radiant loveliness. The law was given to 
Moses amid the glory and majesty of Mount Sinai, 
and the starry heavens became a temple in which 
Old Testament saints sang praises to the Eternal. 
It was in a garden in the cool of the day that God 
walked and talked with His children, and in all the 
world there is no place so inspiring, so full of 
beauty as a garden where life and loveliness whis- 
per their messages of joy and peace. God is not 
only in His heaven, He is in everything that lives. 


There is part of the sun in an apple, 

There is part of the moon in a rose, 

There is part of the flaming Pleiades in 
everything that grows. 


Out of the vast comes nearness, 

For the God whose love we sing 

Lends a little of His heaven to 
every living thing. 


There is nothing in the Bible more attractive 
than the story of the Garden of Eden. It is nota 
story to be legislated about but to be lived by and 


170 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


interpreted by those who have hearts to understand 
and eyes to see. To walk in that garden is to 
walk not only with God but to walk with little 
children in the paths of innocency, by crystal 
streams that make glad the heart of humanity, for 
life, when it is right.with God, is like a garden and 
there righteousness and peace kiss each other. 
Dorothy Frances Gurney has put the story into 
lovely verse: 


Lhe Lord God planted a garden 

In the first white days of the world, 
And He set there an angel warden 

In a garment of light enfurled. 


So near to the peace of Heaven, 

That the hawk might nest with the wren, 
For there mm the cool of the even 

God walked with the first of men. 


And I dream that these garden closes 
With their shade and their sun-flecked sod 
And their lilies and bowers of roses, 


Were laid by the hand of God. 


The kiss of the sun for pardon, 
The song of the birds for mirth, 
One 1s nearer God’s heart in a garden 
Than anywhere else on earth. 


It is all true. It is God who plants the garden. 
It is God who whispers peace between the hawk 


THE LORD PLANTED A GARDEN 171 


and the wren. It is God who lays the lilies and the 
bowers of roses. It is God who makes the flowers 
and the sunshine, and in the garden God walks with 
His children in the fellowship of eternal love. So 
life began, and so the saints of God who have found 
fellowship restored in the Cross have found life to 
be, and after the long record of sin is ended, Para- 
dise is restored in the new heaven and the new 
earth—in that redeemed Eden, where flows the 
river of life clear as crystal. 

The poet, however, tells only part of the garden- 
story. The verses are true, but not wholly true; 
for instead of being nearer God’s heart in a gar- 
den than anywhere else on earth, before the story 
ends Adam and Eve found that they were nearer 
the heart of a serpent. Instead of walking with 
God in the cool of the day they held fellowship in 
the garden with hypocrisy and deceit, with lies and 
shame, and Eden became the background of life’s 
greatest tragedy. Itis oftenso. Cardinal Wolsey 
walked in the king’s garden and held fellowship 
with royalty and rank, with the glories of position 
and power; but he found that he was nearer the 
heart of treachery than he was to the heart of God, 
and before his death confessed that had he served 
his God with half the zeal with which he had served 
his king he would not, in his old age, have been 
left naked to his enemies. Nero lived and walked 
in the royal gardens of Rome, but against the 


172 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


beauty and loveliness of the Eternal City he made 
bonfires of the bodies of the Christians who refused 
him the allegiance of their hearts, and the gardens 
of Rome became scenes of persecution, the record 
of which still stains the pages of history. 

The story of the Garden of Eden gives the lie to 
that form of religious and moral reform which as- 
serts that all men need is a healthy environment— 
@ residence in a garden. In our day there is much 
talk about environment, about helpful and health- 
ful surroundings, about the redemption that comes 
through trees and flowers and gardens and bowers 
of beauty. We have no word to utter against such 
a philosophy, for we cannot have things too beau- 
tiful in this world. God made the world beautiful; 
it is man who has succeeded in making it ugly. 
Think of the beauty that once must have been 
resident along the rivers beside which we live, and 
think of the hideous ugliness which has its abiding 
place there now! 

God would have life like a garden, but to keep 
life like a garden we must dwell with beauty and 
loveliness in our own souls. Gardens and trees and 
flowers and the kiss of the sun will not keep a life 
beautiful and serene. Something more is needed 
than a garden, and one may be nearer the heart of 
evil and passion and pride and vanity in a garden 
than anywhere else on earth. It was in the very 
presence of the loveliness and beauty of the life 


THE LORD PLANTED A GARDEN 173 


of Christ that Judas cultivated treachery and de- 
veloped the spirit of avarice and selfishness that 
wrecked his life. John Bunyan, in Pilgrim’s Prog- 
ress, portrays the character of one of his pilgrims 
who passed over the road through the enchanted 
country, dwelling for a time in Beulah Land where 
the air was very sweet and pleasant and the singing 
of birds was heard continually and where flowers 
were ever blooming. But that same pilgrim goes 
down to destruction from the very gate of heaven. 

To be near God’s heart one must find fellowship 
with God, not in circumstances alone, or in na- 
ture alone, but in the holy of holies of one’s own 
heart. One is always suspicious of those who ex- 
cuse themselves from worship and secret prayer by 
saying that they are nearer God’s heart in a gar- 
den. They forget that the idolatry and immorality 
and shamelessness of paganism were cultured and 
carried on in the groves and gardens of Israel and 
Greece and Rome. 

One cannot imagine a better environment than 
Eden. One could not picture a situation where 
character might have been more easily cultured and 
holiness attained than that which surrounded Adam 
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Yet the outcome 
of that experiment was failure and tragedy. On 
the other hand, one cannot imagine a more danger- 
ous and desolate place than a wilderness, but it 
was in the wilderness that victory and triumph 


174 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


came and Paradise was regained. Life began in 
the innocency of Eden, and there the serpent en- 
tered and sin shadowed the world. But Paradise 
was regained in the wilderness of Judza where 
Christ was alone with the forces of evil and with 
the angels. Read the story of our Lord’s tempta- 
tion and victory as it is given in the Gospel of St. 
Mark. ‘And immediately the Spirit driveth him 
into the wilderness. And he was there in the wil- 
derness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was 
with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered 
unto him.” What a wilderness it was! Barren 
and shelterless and lonely, no flowers, no cooling 
shade, no spring bursting from the rock; nature 
seemed menacing and threatening, but there Jesus 
walked with God. 

It has often been so. Men have often been 
nearer God’s heart in the desert than in a garden. 
It was in a desert in the land of Midian that Moses 
saw the glory of God in the flaming bush. It was 
in the wilderness that Elijah was touched by 
angels’ hands and fed with the very bread of 
heaven. It was in the loneliness of his exile and 
banishment in the bleak and barren coasts of Pat- 
mos that John saw the living Christ, walking in 
the midst of the churches, whose eyes were as a 
flame of fire, whose voice was as the voice of many 
waters. 

Years ago a flower show was held where the 


THE LORD PLANTED A GARDEN 175 


flowers exhibited were those grown only in the city 
of London. It is one thing to grow flowers in 
bring beauty to perfection; but it is another thing 
to grow roses and lilies in shadowed courts, in nar- 
row backyards, on tenement window-sills, and on 
the tiles and flat roofs of apartment buildings. We 
read that even Queen Victoria came to see this 
flower display, for there, in that strange revealing 
of beauty, was manifested the triumph over the 
mean and sordid conditions of life. The most deli- 
cate and precious of our flowers, as one of our 
Canadian writers has pointed out, grow in the deep 
recesses and shadows of the canyons; and in like 
manner the flowers of the Spirit, faith and love and 
joy and gentleness, grow where there has been suf- 
fering and sorrow, loneliness and obscurity. 

John Milton showed his understanding of the 
divine revelation when he closed Paradise Re- 
gained with Jesus’ victory in the wilderness. 
There, in the wilderness—alone—Christ saw the 
shadow of a mighty cross and in His victory Para- 
dise was restored. Because of His victory the wil- 
derness blossoms as the rose and the desert be- 
comes a garden in which grows the Tree of Life, 
the leaves of which are for the healing of the na- 
tions. This is why the Bible closes amidst the 
beauty and glory of a new heaven and a new earth. 
For redemption is not complete until the beauty 


176 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


that is within corresponds to the beauty that is 
without, until life made beautiful by His redemp- 
tion lives in the loveliness and light of a redeemed 
world. When humanity is born again in the image 
of the invisible God, then Paradise is regained and 
all things are made new. 

‘To make things new,’ says George Matheson, 
‘is not the same as to make new things. To make 
new things is the work of the hand; to make things 
new is the work of the heart. Whenever one sits 
upon the throne of the heart, all things are made 
new. They are made so without changing a line, 
without altering a feature. Enthrone in your heart 
an object of love, and you have renewed the uni- 
verse. You have given an added note to every 
bird, a fresh joy to every brook, a fairer tint to 
every flower.’ Enthrone Christ in your heart, and 
you will have a new heaven and a new earth. 


XVI 
THE MYSTIC 


CALE YOUNG RICE 


P AHE quest of the soul is one of the facts of 
life. The search for the Unknown has 
been continuous since time began. Altars 

to the Unknown God have been erected in every age 
and in every land, and men everywhere have felt 
after the sacred secret, if haply they could make 
the glad discovery. ‘They have sought for it more 
than for gold hidden in the hills. 

History has never wanted for adventurers, who 
have ridden to the end of thought in their search 
for eternal truth. We find the quest in the Old 
Testament, and nowhere is it voiced more per- 
suasively than in the plaintive words of the Book 
of Job. 


‘Oh that I knew where I might find him! 

That I might come even to his seat! 

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; 

And backward, but I cannot perceive him: 

On the left hand, where he doth work, but I can- 
not behold him: 

He hideth himself on the right hand, that I can- 
not see him.’ 


It finds frequent expression in the Psalms. 
trav 


178 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, 
So panteth my soul after thee, O God. 
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.’ 


It is everywhere vocal in the prophets and poets: 


“Canst thou by searching find out God? 
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? 
It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? 
Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? 
The measure thereof is longer than the earth, 
And broader than the sea.’ 


The same spirit of wistfulness is in modern lit- 
erature. It is a characteristic note of recent 
poetry. An authority on the subject says that our 
best modern poetry is filled with a sense of home- 
sickness, appearing as a continual quest for truth 
and beauty. It is this quest that is given sig- 
nificant expression in the verses entitled The Mys- 
tac by Cale Young Rice. The poet represents him- 
self as riding the thoughts of his mind in swift 
pursuit after the divine mystery. 


There is a quest that calls me 
In nights when I am lone, 

The need to ride where the ways divide 
The Known from the Unknown. 

I mount what thought is near me 
And soon I reach the place, 

The tenuous rim where the Seen grows dim 
And the Sightless hides its face. 


THE MYSTIC 179 


I have ridden the wind, 

I have ridden the sea, 

I have ridden the moon and stars. 

I have set my feet in the stirrup seat 
Of a comet coursing Mars. 

And everywhere 

Thro’ the earth and air 

My thought speeds, lightning-shod, 

It comes to a place where checking pace 
It cries, ‘Beyond lies God!’ 


One can almost hear the anxious beating of the 
hoofs, as they speed on, to the very rim of the uni- 
verse. Imagination trembles on the margin of 
mystery and seeks an answer to the question *‘ Does 
God really lie beyond, or is there only emptiness 
and vacancy?’ Skeptics have stood in their grief 
and peered into the darkness, calling aloud to the 
silence, and the only answer they have received has 
been the echo of their wailing cry. Is that all? 
Is the poet really justified in saying ‘ Beyond lies 
God’? Is life just the spreading of the canvas 
without picture or painting? What, then, is the 
use of preparing the colours and spreading the 
canvas, if there is no picture and no painting? We 
feel that we are not only reaching but also grasping 
and our confidence in our own nature and in the 
universe is such that we cannot think we are always 
and everywhere deceived. It is God Himself who 
has placed eternity in the heart and lured us on to 
seek Him. The mind is not satisfied to rest in 


180. THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


negatives and presses on in unceasing quest, for 
out of the silence the soul believes it hears a voice 
that calis. 


It calls me out of the darkness, 
It calls me out oy sleep, 
‘Ride! ride! for you must, to the end of Dust!’ 
It bids—and on I sweep 
Lo the wide outposts of Being, 
Where there is Gulf alone— 
And thro’ a Vast that was never passed 
I listen for Life’s tone. 


I have ridden the wind, 

I have ridden the night, 

I have ridden the ghosts that flee 

From the vaults of death like a chilling 
breath 

Over eternity. 

And everywhere 

Is the world laid bare— 

Ether and star and clod— 

Until I wind to its brink and find 

But the cry, ‘ Beyond les God!’ 


The question arises, whether it is a call or only 
an urge of the spirit. Is it a sense of something 
merely subjective, or is there something or some 
one out and beyond us that issues the call? Is 
God only a ‘ projection’ of the mind, or is He a 
reality and is our seeking after Him the surest evi- 
dence of His ever living and abiding presence? If 
the so-called projections of the lower nature feel 


THE MYSTIC 181 


out and find their satisfaction in objective reality, 
why should we deny a corresponding reality to the 
promptings of the spirit? The call that comes 
from the lower world receives an answering re- 
sponse in us. So does the call of the highest. In 
each case the response is to reality, for the quest 
after goodness, truth and beauty is evidence of 
something that lies far beyond our subjective 
moods. 


It calls me and ever calls me! 

And vainly I reply, 
‘ Fools only ride where the ways divide 

What Is from the Whence and Why!’ 

I’m lifted into the saddle 
Of thoughts too strong to tame 

And down the deeps and over the steeps 
I find—ever the same. 


I have ridden the wind, 

I have ridden the stars, 

I have ridden the force that flies 
With far intent thro’ the firmament 
And each to each allies. 

And everywhere 

That a thought may dare 

To gallop, mine has trod— 

Only to stand at last on the strand 
Where just beyond lies God. 


We hear the call, when we think deeply concern- 
ing the nature of the universe. Its vastness over- 


182 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


whelms us. Following the light from sun and 
stars, we are led to the very margin of the infinite. 
We live in a world where the paths are measured 
only by light years, and so distant is the sun and 
the stars that flame in the far-flung clusters of the 
starry heavens that, if one of the most distant 
should be snuffed out, it would require two hundred 
thousand years for a ray of light, travelling at the 
speed of six million million miles a year, to bring 
us tidings of the disaster. Yet the universe is not 
infinite, but is held in the hollow of the hand of 
Him who said, ‘ Let there be light.’ 

It is not alone the unity of the world in its great- 
ness, but also the unity of the world in its little- 
ness that wraps our thought in mystery. The 
physicist is telling us that the smallest thing known, 
the atom, is itself a universe with its own system 
of sun and stars, keeping their exact orbits, as in 
the case of the planets. Like the universe the 
minutely invisible atom, ‘a house not made with 
hands,’ is so delicately ordered that one of our 
greatest astronomers has said, ‘ It transcends so far 
anything that could be produced by any infinitely 
magnified model of the human form, that we must 
recognize that only a spiritual power can lie behind 
it.’ We do not wonder that scientists, who are 
ever gazing into mystery and standing on the holy 
ground of the unknown, are reverent beyond the 
dreams of men who muckrake in the rubbish of 


THE MYSTIC 183 


the street. Riding their thoughts out into the mys- 
tery of the night, they hold the faith that ‘ Beyond 
lies God.’ 

We are face to face with the same mystery and 
hear the same call, when we think deeply concern- 
ing the fact of sin. And think we must. We 
cannot avoid thinking about the problem of evil 
and, when our thoughts lead us out, we are brought 
again to the margin of the eternal. Sooner or 
later we stand in the presence of sin, our sin, the 
sin of which we have been guilty and say ‘Against 
Thee, Thee only have I sinned.’ 

Every one of us knows the certainty of that fact, 
and all the great dramas of literature which have 
analyzed conscience have brought men face to face 
with God. In Macbeth we are left in the silence, 
alone with God and the trembling soul of a man to 
whom sin had come home. The name of God slips 
into the record and all the perfumes of Arabia are 
not sufficient to sweeten life again. In Haw- 
thorne’s The Scarlet Letter the offender is led at 
last to confession, for the call of conscience ‘ bayed 
like bloodhounds in his blood,’ until he came be- 
fore the great white throne of God, and there his 
sin was yielded up ‘not with reluctance, but with 
a joy unutterable.’? In Dostoieffsky’s Crime and 
Punishment, perhaps the greatest of all analytical 
studies of the problem of evil, in almost every chap- 
ter the criminal is brought face to face with God, 


184 THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


and at last, in surrender to God, he found relief in 
penitence. 

The eternal quest for peace, in the midst of the 
evil of the world, leads men on through doubt and 
darkness, because of the thought that beyond lies 
God. Robert Browning has a little poem entitled 
The Worst of It. What is the worst of it? There 
has been deception; there has been ruin; there 
have been broken vows and lost friendships, but 
the worst of all is ‘What will God say?’ Con- 
science in the end finds a man and there is no es- 
cape. To find security we must flee into the very 
presence of Holiness itself. The soul cries out ‘O 
wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me 
from the body of this death?’ And the answer is 
‘I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ 

We hear the call, when we think deeply on the 
subject of goodness. Virtue is even more mys- 
terious in its origin and continuance than vice. 
Goodness is more difficult to understand than evil. 
The New Testament speaks about the mystery of 
iniquity, but what shall we say regarding the mys- 
tery of virtue? Why are men good? Why is 
goodness alluring? Why does the ideal lead us on? 
Why cannot we rest satisfied with things as they 
are? Why do we thrill to the heroic and fall in 
love with the true and the good and the beautiful? 
Why do we respond to the appeal to love the things 
that are lovely and of good report? Why is there 


THE MYSTIC 185 


a response within us to the higher realities beyond 
the reach of argument and of criticism? It is an 
interesting subject. The call to the things that 
make for overthrow we can understand. The driit 
is towards the rocks. But why are we ever push- 
ing onward and upward, unsatisfied, feeling aiter 
goodness, if haply we may find it? One good man 
puts to flight the whole army of agnostics. Whence 
came he and why is he? There is darkness shad- 
owing every sin but there is a heavenly light il- 
luminating every thought of holiness, every deed 
of love. 


Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch, 

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, 

A chorus-ending from Euripides,— 

And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears 

As old and new at once as nature’s self, 

To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring 

Round the ancient idol, on his base again,— 

The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly. 

There the old misgivings, crooked questions 
are— 

This good God,—what He could do, if He 
would, 

Would, if He could—then must have done long 
since. 


To look upon the beauty of a rose, to gaze into 
the face of a sleeping child, to feel the kiss of 
motherhood upon the cheek, to thrill to the touch 


186 .THE GOSPEL IN MODERN POETRY 


of sympathy upon the hand, to listen to whispering 
music, to face purity in the countenance of age, to 
do all these is to stand in the presence of the Di- 
vine and behold the reflected image of God Him- 
self. With the Mystic we feel, somehow, that be- 
yond lies God. 

This wistfulness of the soul must find reality, or 
it will lose itself in the dismal swamp of sentimental 
mysticism. We cannot rest in illusions, and a 
mysticism that has no relation to personality will 
not satisfy the heart. We must see and know, and 
in the New Testament we do see, and we do know. 
There is little or no wistfulness in the New Testa- 
ment. ‘There we see God in the face of Jesus 
Christ, and the Wise Men, who came out of the 
East, seeking and searching, asking ‘Where is 
He?’ received their answer. Before all the altars 
erected to the unknown gods the Christian stands 
and announces the fact that God has spoken. He 
says to all seekers, ‘What therefore ye worship in 
ignorance, this I set forth unto you.’ 

In Jesus Christ the search comes to an end, be- 
cause in Him we find God. This is not an argu- 
ment. It is the announcement of an historic fact. 
The only God we know is the God who has been 
revealed to us in the Scriptures. For us He an- 
swers all questions in the world and out of it. He 
draws aside the veil and we see into the mystery. 
Robert Browning, the greatest Christian poet of all 


THE MYSTIC 187 


the poets, spoke of himself as ‘a man who was sure 
of God.’ He had puzzled about many things, but 
of one thing he was sure. He was sure of God. 
He possessed a religious assurance that was to be 
envied, and a friend once asked him about this 
Christian certainty. The poet answered him by 
quoting three lines from his own writings. 


That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and knows. 


After a moment’s pause he added, ‘ That face is 
the face of Christ, and that is how I feel about it.’ 
This is the true way to feel, for the sense of mys- 
tery, which is all about us, is satisfied when we see 
Him. 


Printed in the United States of America 


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